Posted: 2008-01-03 03:11am
by Academia Nut
Sorry its taken so long to update (six days! what a slow writer I am!), but a combination of the holidays, getting the flu, and having to housesit for my aunt and uncle has slowed me down a bit. This chapter doesn't go as far as I initially wanted, but it will do for now.
EDIT: Formatting done
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In the wake of the attack by the Eleventh Angel, things were very quiet for the Children. NERV was still a hornet’s nest of activity as repairs were made, clean-ups instigated, and investigations launched. They were all quite glad to be away from all the activity, for as Shinji had said, “Some weird shit just went down and we were the closest to it, so I don’t think we want to we anywhere near there when they start asking questions.”
Asuka was later in getting home as it had been her turn to help with classroom clean-up, and she had then stopped off at the store to get a few things. She had been feeling an incredible craving for red meat the past few days, so she had splurged and bought a large quantity of pork and beef.
Her first instinct when she got back to the apartment was to rip into the packages and begin eating everything raw, but she pushed that down and instead looked about to see if she could find Shinji. Eventually she knocked on Pen-pen’s fridge and asked, “Any idea where Shinji’s hiding?”
Opening the door, Pen-pen looked at her, said, “Wark,” pointed up, and then went back to his nap.
“Right, roof then,” Asuka says, heading out of the apartment.
Shinji was indeed on the roof, and while judging from his clothes and his staff lying off to the side he had been practicing, he was not doing so currently. Instead, he was sitting in quiet meditation, surrounded by his own congregation of animals. It was kind of creepy the way normally wild creatures would gather peacefully around Shinji and Rei, although at least in Shinji’s case his congregation was much cleaner.
“Communing with nature are you?” Asuka asks.
“Yes,” Shinji says, before gesturing for the various creatures to disperse. Unlike Rei, who had attracted the scavengers and the mongrels and the lost creatures, the vermin no one cared about, Shinji’s congregation was made up of what he called ‘subtle predators’. From the skies birds of prey of both day and night flocked to him and from the ground the snakes slithered forth to see him.
The only creature that did not leave for the night was a proud looking peregrine falcon that had made a nest on the apartment roof. The sharp eyed bird kept watch over its master all throughout the day, a flight of owls patrolling the skies at night but not claiming the territory the way that one falcon had.
Not turning to Asuka, Shinji remained seated, brushing the feathers of the bird while still meditating.
“Horus likes you, you know?” Shinji states idly.
“Horus?” Asuka asks.
“Ancient Egyptian falcon god… and a little in-joke,” Shinji states while nudging the bird to move. Flapping its wings, the falcon takes up position at its roost.
“Some freaky things are happening to us,” Asuka states, sitting down next to Shinji, hugging her knees to her chest.
His eyes still closed, Shinji states, “We are, and always have been and will be, special. Embrace that fact or go mad. Would you be frightened to know the reasoning behind your sudden cravings for strange things?”
Mulling this over, Asuka asks in return, “Would I be more frightened about the ‘why’ or the ‘how you know’?”
Smiling, Shinji says, “You’re learning. Both are frightful.”
“Tell me how you know then,” Asuka says.
“Very well,” Shinji says, still smiling. “In the fight with the Eleventh Angel, I had to guide the evolution of Rei’s diseases, which required an extremely fine control over my abilities. It forced my body to change to accommodate the new requirements of my mind. My remote viewing abilities have been… enhanced, considerably. Aside from microscopic detail, I can now view things in four dimensions.”
“Four dimensions?” Asuka asks curiously.
“It’s hard to explain really. Think of a two dimensional creature, not just flat but completely lacking in the third dimension. Its skin would be its perimeter, with all of its organs and such inside the area described, just like our skin encloses our volume. If you think about the way our eyes work, we only really see in two dimensions, but we have tricks like binocular vision to give us an approximation of three dimensional vision via depth perception. A two dimensional creature would be the same; it would only be able to see in one dimension because its eyes would have to be on its perimeter to actually interact with its world. If you were to show a 3-D object to such a creature, it would only be able to see slices of it at a time. If you were to show a 4-D object to us, we would only be able to see blobs of it at a time, and it would just be a confusing mess. Of course, for a 3-D creature looking at a 2-D creature, you could see all of it at once, its insides, everything. Hell, you could reach down and poke it right in the guts and there would be nothing it could do about it. Well, now I have 4-D vision if I focus properly. I can literally see the entirety of a 3-D object all at once,” Shinji says, attempting an explanation.
“So that means that?” Asuka asks.
Grinning, Shinji says, “Well for one, unless you have clothing that exists in four dimensions they’re pretty much useless for the purposes of concealing things.”
Whacking him playfully upside the head, Asuka says, “Stupid pervert.”
Rubbing the spot where he was hit painfully, Shinji says, “And the other thing is that I can see your insides all at once. Combined with microscopic viewing, it gives me a rather unique way of looking at the changes occurring to us. Makes applying telekinesis rather interesting as well.”
Asuka shuddered as she felt invisible fingers running all across and inside her body in a pleasantly visceral way.
“I have already memorized the map of the entire human peripheral nervous system through experimentation upon myself and others; I know what every last nerve, every last dendrite, does and how they connect. It’s actually rather frightening the sort of intelligence needed to do this in a few days, but then again most people just see a tangled mess, I can lay out every last connection without having pieces running over and around one another. It makes it much easier to tell them apart,” Shinji says, still running telekinetic fingers through Asuka.
Panting a few times at the alien sensations he is making her feel, Asuka says, “That… that’s enough for now.” He could effortless combine together sensations, triggering simultaneous warm and cold feelings while mixing them with painless cutting and purple-green bursts of light and the flavour of strawberries bursting in her mouth.
Discontinuing it with a wave, Shinji says, “Very well, I am no deviant Slaaneshi to revel in such things anyway. My original intent of such mapping was of course to be able to have a new way of taking someone down. A tap in the right place and a person could fall to the ground screaming as they feel as if their entire body is on fire. It would last but a few moments, but the effects could be devastating nonetheless. It is so much simpler than a direct psychic attack too.”
Thinking about this, Asuka asks, “Is this why the news was talking about the fit the President of the United States suffered yesterday?”
Chuckling darkly, Shinji says, “His public address was annoying me. It took quite a bit of effort to do a viewing and a telekinetic burst over that kind of distance, but it shut him up quite effectively.”
Shrugging at Shinji’s admission of such a use of his powers, Asuka asks, “So this has to do with me how?”
“Ah yes. As I was saying, I can see you inside and out all at once, and your body is changing in ways not normal for fourteen year olds. Your biochemistry is changing for one. It’s pretty subtle now, but I have no idea how long it will go on. For example, feel my hand,” Shinji says, holding out his left hand.
Taking it in hers, Asuka recoils in shock and says, “It’s ice cold!”
Grinning, Shinji says, “Actually your body temperature is somewhere about forty degrees Celsius, give or take half a degree.”
“What! That’s impossible!” Asuka says, although she had been wearing more clothing the past few days as she had felt chilled.
Poking her in the stomach, the organ not the belly in general, Shinji says, “Telekinesis is possible and you having an elevated internal body temperature and not suffering any ill effects isn’t?”
“Uh…” Asuka says, not really having any response to that sort of thing.
Smiling crookedly, Shinji says, “Well, I always knew my girlfriend was hot, but this is just taking it a touch further than expected.”
“Okay, why am I so hot then?” Asuka asks.
“Should I start with the breasts, thighs, ass or face?” Shinji asks.
Whacking him again, Asuka says with a touch of worry in her voice, “Okay, stop kidding around and tell me what’s going on.”
Wincing, Shinji mutters, “That spot was already tender from the first time.” After regaining his composure, he says, “Your body is running hot because its burning lots of extra energy rearranging itself, and your own natural psychic field is protecting you from the ill effects. The reason you’re so hungry lately, especially for red meat, is because your body suddenly has a massive demand for fresh proteins for all the new construction it’s doing.”
“So my temperature will go back down?” Asuka asks.
Shrugging, Shinji says, “Probably, although just looking at some of the new protein structures and how much more robust they are your body temperature will still probably be above human normal when this is all done. Maintaining all that new hardware is going to be pretty energy intensive I think.”
“Okay, so what new stuff do I have?” Asuka asks.
“Well, for starters your muscle fibres are now using a denser, more efficient form than what humans use, which is why when you slap me even lightly now it fucking hurts like a bitch. To keep from snapping your own limbs every time your flex your muscles, your bones are being reinforced with a biological form of a titanium-steel alloy. Incidentally, your iron uptake is going through the roof and your usage is going to be a bit wonky as your bones go through this reinforcement. It also explains why you’ve been drinking white paint,” Shinji tells her.
“I have not been drinking paint!” Asuka cries out indignantly.
“Relax; I said there was an explanation. Almost all modern white paints contain titanium dioxide as the primary pigment, and your body suddenly has a demand for titanium it didn’t before. Plus, I found the bottles, and disposed of them more carefully so Misato-san won’t ask why there are a dozen empty bottles of white paint lying around,” Shinji tells her.
“Oh,” Asuka says, blushing, glade that Shinji can’t see her with his eyes closed and in the waning light of the dying day.
“Yes. There are several dozen other changes being made as well. Your vision might be a little blurry at the moment, don’t worry, that will go away in a day or so. Your retinas are detaching one at a time and moving to new positions, along with new ones being grown. When it is all done your eyesight will be many times sharper than normal. Your digestive tract is changing into a smaller, more efficient form and your lungs and liver are expanding. Your kidneys are becoming more efficient at extracting water and expelling toxins. The conduction speeds of your nerves are increasing. I can continue if you want, the list of changes is quite long though,” Shinji tells her.
“No… I don’t think I need to know…” Asuka says in a frightened tone.
“If you’re afraid of these changes, don’t worry. Each one is fairly subtle, and it’s only the fact that so many are occurring that makes it so big. The net effect will be that by the time this is all over you should be able to head butt a brick wall, a load bearing one at that, and the wall will come off worse than you,” Shinji tells her.
“So… I’m becoming some sort of super soldier?” Asuka asks in a quiet tone.
Shrugging, Shinji says, “Pretty close to one.”
“I suppose that’s pretty cool, but I don’t know how that will help when we keep getting attacked by the Angels,” Asuka says.
Smiling wryly, Shinji points out, “It will sure as hell help when you’re getting knocked around the entry plug. I was damn near in a constant state of being bruised between Ramiel and Israfel.”
Smiling at that, Asuka says, “That’s true.”
Running a telekinetic finger up her spine, making her shiver, Shinji says, “You’re moping Asuka. Do you know what that means?”
“It’s time for a sloppy make-out session?” Asuka asks hopefully.
“Fuck yeah it’s time for a sloppy make-out session,” Shinji says, opening his eyes and then springing from his sitting position to tackle her.”
They playfully wrestled for a while, Shinji barely able to counter Asuka’s greater strength with his ability to predict her moves and weasel out of thing. Finally though Asuka managed to overpower him and pin his shoulders to the ground while straddling his hips to keep his legs under control.
Staring down at him, Asuka asks, “Shinji… could we go a little further this time?”
“How much further?” Shinji inquires.
“Well… I really liked what you did earlier with your telekinesis, and I was… um… wondering… if…” Asuka says, chewing her lip in hesitation.
“If I would do that to… shall we say more sensitive areas?” Shinji finishes for her.
“Yeah,” Asuka says with a nod. “I… I uh… actually had a… uh… a dream and it had you and it… uh… was really, really good and I’ve been wanting to… uh… ask you if… well… if you wanted to go to third base… for the… well… the uh… past few days.”
Laughing at the brilliant red blush on her face, Shinji says, “Hey, if my girlfriend wants to go to third base, I don’t care if I slide in or levitate in.”
Thinking about his word choice, Asuka glares at him with an amused look on her face and says, “Pervert.”
“Guilty as charged. Now do you want me to do a telekinetic massage or a direct neural stimulation?” Shinji asks.
“Surprise me,” Asuka replies.
She then promptly collapsed off Shinji as a small artillery shell seemed to hit her right between the eyes. Pinning her now, Shinji says, “I’ll let you figure out what that was on your own. Could you lower your mental barriers though? I want to know what is pleasant and what is too much so I can be careful.”
Gasping for air, Asuka looks up at him with half glazed eyes and a slack jaw.
Can you hear me now?
Loud and clear… and that should be feel quite nice for you, now shouldn’t it?
HOLY FUCK! Sweet merciful! Don’t… do… don’t… holy SHIT! Oh wow… oh wow… oh fuck! Fuck Shinji, you keep this up and sex will be a let down!
I doubt that. It will just be one more appendage to work with.
Oh God! Oh God, you’re a fucking octopus already! Oh sweet Khorne take me now!
Elsewhere in the city, Rei was watching this all through her mind, her envy growing. She could contain it… for now… but she wanted Shinji, wanted him the way Asuka had him. To a certain degree she hated the bitch… and to another degree she loved her just as intensely.
“You long to lie with them both,” a dry, cracked voice says to her.
“You are a figment of my imagination,” Rei replies.
“We are symptoms of a disease, a glorious, beautiful disease,” a gurgling, infected voice tells her happily.
“Silence,” Rei says, glaring at the two heads of her previous incarnations on the altar. She had already sown their mouths shut with heavy string, but still they spoke with her.
Worse yet, there was a third voice that had no head, the voice of her first incarnation. It flitted about at all times, its voice small and cruel in the way only children could be.
“In time, you too shall join us,” the childish voice says.
“Silence,” Rei IV orders.
“We cannot be silenced. We are you, you are we. Our soul has been reincarnated so many times, it has begun to fragment. Your wearing of our mindless sisters has accelerated the process, and what you learned from Ireul about group minds has made it worse,” Rei III tells her.
“Then I am going insane,” Rei IV says in annoyance.
“We are merely an expression your nature. Our voices add to your own, your minds to yours. After all, three heads are better than one!” Rei III says before beginning to chuckle wetly. A blow of telekinesis sends the bloated, cancerous head, caught in a state of perpetual rot, bouncing away.
“Three merely wishes to tell you the truth of the matter, just as I do. You cannot deny for instance that you joined with her in dream the other night,” Rei II says in her perpetually dry voice, the effects of the strange mummification that had happened to her.
Flopping down angrily, Rei IV cannot deny that bit of information. All the tiny bones of all the thousands of creatures that came here to die rattled between her fingers, the sound drowning out her own thoughts for a time.
Rei had stopped dreaming ever since she had incarnated in this form. Instead, when her body rested, her soul, already only loosely connected to any one body, drifted, lost upon the psychic sea of the hundreds of thousands of others slumbering at night. Every night she visited dozens of others, leaving them how she say fit. She was a young boy’s wet dream, an old woman’s fond memory, a guilty man’s nightmare.
And two nights ago, she had found Asuka’s soul in her meaningless drifting.
Rei had wept in her mind when she first beheld it, for she finally understood why Shinji had chosen Asuka over her. Rei had emotion and passion now, but it had taken her a long time to get it right, and even now she was barely a candle in comparison to the supernova that was Asuka.
In the dreamscape horned demons wielding crooked axes standing in front of a wall of boiling blood had prevented initial access, but one of the gatekeepers recognized Rei and allowed her within. Instead of being a free agent within the dreamscape, Rei and Asuka’s mind mingled, each sharing the other’s thoughts and sensations. Asuka did not understand what was happening, and would probably never know about Rei’s involvement unless she told her.
At the time Rei joined in, Asuka had been dreaming about just talking with Shinji, a simple memory being processed by the dream. With Rei’s involvement though, the dream had moved from simple talking to a full blown make-out session. Rei had revelled in all the memories Asuka had of Shinji’s touch to make the experience all the more real.
And then Rei had added her own contribution: Dr. Akagi’s adult memories, ripped from the woman’s mind over a week before. The two girls had been one as the dream Shinji did wonderful, incredible things to her/them. When it was all over and Rei’s mind drifted back to her body, she had immediately finished off what had been started. She suspected Asuka did the same.
Since then she had been melancholy in her obsession. She wanted the dream to be real. She wanted to feel Shinji inside her, to feel the warmth of his breath on her bare skin, the dripping of his sweat upon her back, the…
Asuka had invaded her fantasies too. She wanted to lie naked with the other girl and play with her. She wanted to be with her, for their saliva and other fluids to mingle. For Asuka to shudder with joy as Rei went to work and the blessings of Nurgle to do their job. For Asuka to cry out in joy just as her body finished breaking down into a bag of blackened pus that would burst upon Rei. And then Rei would wallow in the toxic remains of the other girl, immune to the disease that had removed the competition.
But never immune to Shinji’s glare. He would hate her forever if she did such a thing to the one he loved. Her fantasies of what he did grew worse with each successive version. He had begun by killing her in gruesome ways, ripping her apart with his telekinesis or throwing lightning bolts at her until her organs began to burst out of her flesh with the heat. Then it had moved on to a lifetime of torture, of reducing Rei to a quadruple amputee, her only sensations pain.
The worst though, was when Shinji killed himself. He did it just to spite her. For killing his love, he would give Rei no attention at all. At first these terrible thoughts had been Rei trying to continue on without him, but then Shinji and Asuka came back to taunt her, spirits eternally together in the afterlife, and she could not join them. No matter what Rei did, there was always another clone to keep her from the afterlife, while Shinji and Asuka just laughed cruelly in the shadows as the bodies piled up in one futile attempt after the other.
In other fantasies, it was Rei that dissolved, becoming the bacteria that swam in Asuka’s blood and guts, to be ever with the other girl, to gaze out through her eyes whenever Shinji smiled, to feel through her skin whenever Shinji touched her, and to know the love he had for the other girl. She would never be able to hop over to Shinji though. Even when he was plunging in and out of Asuka’s orifices, Rei could never make the leap between them. In fact, the closest she ever came to such a feat was when she cuddled up next to the child developing in Asuka’s womb as a result of their actions, their love.
Sadly, the most realistic fantasy was also the one Rei dreaded the most. In it, she and Asuka lay naked, intertwined, kissing and touching each other so as to arouse Shinji, who sat and watched their antics with amusement. He would then join the two of them, and they would take turns in serving him, in accepting him into their bodies. It was wondrous, it was possible… and it was heart crushing. Because no matter how much Shinji accepted Rei, she would always be second to Asuka, and that hurt.
“Second place is better than not ranking at all,” Rei II whispers to her.
“Indeed. Follow your heart. Ask Asuka if she wants to share. She is the one you must win over. If she asks Shinji if you could join them, then he will gladly accept,” Rei III says, her head having returned to its place on the altar while Rei IV was thinking.
“Or if you’re truly that desperate you could ask his father… but then again he would just use you because you’re a part clone of his dead wife,” Rei I says, giggling cruelly.
A tear fell from Rei’s face and hit the ground. For a moment black fungus and mould began to grow before Rei snuffed out the life before it spread out of control and finished off what Second Impact had started. She had always been at best second in the hearts and minds of others: a pitiful doll for a broken old man to lust after in place of his dead wife; the pilot of the prototype, the back-up for the test-type and production model; or just the quiet, creepy girl in glass.
The only one who had ever accepted her, ever truly cared for her, had been Shinji, and he was in love with another.
Wiping away her tears, Rei nodded and said to her heads, “Tomorrow there is a test at NERV; I shall confront Asuka… and find out if she would be willing to share.”
“That’s a girl,” her predecessors say in unison.
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“Butterfly, a curious creature unique. What does it do, but flap its wings? Unique, but for the millions of others like it. One takes flight, its fellows follow, millions of wings stirring the air. Air, stirred, takes on a life of its own. Eddies and vortices, currents and streams, invisible patterns, unseen by human eyes but felt nonetheless. What is a human? A creation of other the gods, or something more or something less? Can a human perceive the flapping of a butterfly’s wings for what it is? Can a man see the whirlwinds created by that which he casually disturbs?
“Who is this before me, to whom the butterflies flock? What is this starry eyed man? Why does his smile scare me so? Why do I fall into his eyes, swimming with stars? Galaxies spin, suns explode, and the universe goes on expanding, growing cold and dark. But even in the darkness, the perturbations of the butterflies remain, and at the very end, that man is still there, still smiling. What is this in the palm of his hand?
“What is this? What is this? By the gods what is this?”
Rei’s screams ended the test before it had even gone past the absolute borderline. Ritsuko wanted to grab a cigarette to ease her but after her little attack she had been forbidden from smoking and been forced to massively cut back on her caffeine intake. It had left her annoyed and irritable, and considering the disasters that had been happening while she was out, this was a bad thing.
Gendo was furious with the results that the Children had been giving for the past month, and it was all coming to a head. Simply put, Shinji did not respond to synchronization “correctly”, and instead seemed to have his own methods, methods that NERV science did not understand, for making his Eva move the way he wanted it to. Despite only having a 55% synchronization rating, he consistently had the most powerful AT-fields and his Eva always responded in real time.
This behaviour was infecting the other pilots. Rei’s synch rating had hit a similar plateau at 55%, and Asuka seemed to be dropping towards that level as well even though her reaction times were increasing. Of course, while immensely useful in combat, these results were absolutely useless for the Dummy Plug project.
And now Rei, considered the most universally compatible of the Children, and by far the most level person on the planet, was having a panic attack while trying to synchronize with Unit 01. This unfortunately confirmed what Ritsuko had feared: a combat “mature” Eva would only synchronize with its designated Pilot. The metamorphosis that had been happening was changing everything they knew about the Evas, which already was terrifying small, considering that they were using them for war machines.
The moment Shinji had been put into Unit 00 for that part of the test he had immediately aborted, claiming that he was getting anomalous sensory input. When pressed further, he had embarrassingly admitted that the problem was that the plug had started to smell like Rei as the power-up sequence had begun. Further pressed, he had finally said in exasperation, “Alright, look, it smells like Rei after she’s been in gym class for the past hour and decided to skip the shower and has just cracked open her lunch of natto on sauerkraut with vegemite and blue cheese sauce with diced onions and garlic for flavour and boiled beets for colour. If this smell gets much worse I swear I will throw-up, to say nothing of the distraction this is causing.”
Just looking at his rapidly increasing stress levels and comparing them to the normal cool head Shinji had, Ritsuko had allowed the termination of the test. Clearly Unit 00 liked him no better than Unit 01 liked Rei. At least he had immediately voiced his discomfort and not nearly driven Unit 00 into a berserker state, unlike Rei who had nearly made it to the absolute borderline before losing it.
As it stood right now, Ritsuko guessed that the only Eva that would have a chance of accepting a Dummy Plug was Unit 02. While by raw numbers it had about as many sorties as the other two units and the pilot had been training with it for a much longer period of time, it had not been through the vicious fights with Shamshel or Ramiel, both of which had caused a tremendous amount of damage, and thus regeneration, to the Evas.
Gendo was going to be pissed, because SEELE would be furious with this news. This was not something they needed right now.
At least Rei seemed well behaved.
---
Rei had intended to ask Asuka about her proposal to “share” Shinji in the change room, but before the test they had both arrived at very different times and thus that opportunity had been missed. Rei having to be hauled out of Unit 01 having a panic attack over a hallucination she could only half remember had fouled her plans for an attempt after.
Away from the physical manifestations of the previous fragments of her soul, Rei had also found that she had lost her nerve. Part of it was actual fear of how Asuka would react, while another part was a more well-founded fear of how Commander Ikari would react if he found out. Rei also realized that she had no idea how to really go about this sort of thing.
Thus she found herself standing in front of Major Katsuragi’s office trying to work out the exact wording of how she was going to ask this question. Outright lying seemed like a good idea, but then again Shinji had told her repeatedly that the best lies were, paradoxically, 100% true… from a certain point of view. By carefully presenting one fact you could have someone believe in the exact opposite. The best benefit of all this was that when the truth, the real truth came out, blame for the obfuscation would fall not on the one doing the concealing, but upon the one from whom the truth was concealed from.
Looking up from the pile of paperwork on her desk, Misato sees Rei and says in a surprised voice, “Ah, Ayanami-san, is there something you needed?”
Nodding, Rei steps into the office and asks quietly, “Yes. I have been troubled at school lately, and I felt I should ask you about it.”
“Oh? What makes you think I would be the best one to ask about something like that?” Misato asks with a crooked smile on her face.
“I overheard some girls talking in class. I heard someone saying some unpleasant things about Pilot Soryu.” That Rei had been the one saying these things in the privacy of her apartment was left out. “Or at least I assumed that they were unpleasant by the tone of voice. I did not quite understand the full meaning of some of the terms used, but I have been lead to believe that you would know these things, and as my commanding officer, I felt it best to talk to you.”
Frowning, Misato gets up and closes the door before going around to sit back on her chair and asks intently, “What did you hear Rei?”
Frowning slightly, Rei says, “I heard someone call Pilot Soryu a ‘whore whose ears hang on Pilot Ikari’s every word while she hangs off him by sucking on to his penis’. Individual these words I understand, but together I do not comprehend the full meaning.”
Face planting into her desk, Misato grumbles, “Of all the things I expected to have to do in my life, this was not one of them. Alright, strap in kid, because I’m going to give you the same talk I gave Shinji and Asuka. If you’re that clueless, you need to hear what I have to say.”
Three hours later and Misato was running out of things to tell Rei. Unlike the other two, she had not flinched from a word said, merely sitting back quietly and listening, asking questions about things she did not quite understand. Somehow Misato had got going and by the end of it she was somehow explaining what a ‘gangbang’ meant using examples from her wilder college days.
Trailing off at, “…and we were all kind of awkward around one another for the next week…” Misato slumps over, everything she knew about the birds and the bees that could be vocalized to a minor somehow drawn out of her.
“I… see…” Rei says softly. “So you never initiated one of these events?”
“No… I was usually quite drunk at the time,” Misato says, blushing with embarrassment at the memories.
“Then I will just have to make sure I am never drunk. Thank you Major Katsuragi, that was most educational,” Rei says with a nod before getting up to leave.
“You’re welcome Rei. I’m just glad you came to me for that sort of thing rather than trying to figure it out yourself,” Misato says, inwardly wincing at how screwed up her own past had been because of the dearth of strong parental figures to reign in her self-destructive impulses. Fortunately Rei wasn’t the wild, party type likely to get involved in something like that.
Snorting, Misato wondered if Rei even knew what sex was before coming down here.
