Doctor Who: The Evangelion Error (Book Two)

E13 Part 3: Fast In My Car

NERV Headquarters. Central Dogma. The Eva Cages.

Without warning, a deep rumbling sound -- mixed with high-pitched tones and whines, like glitches in an audio stream -- echoed throughout the cage.

One of the engineers on duty, Frank Gregory, looked over to his coworker. "What the hell was that? Earthquake?"

The other engineer shrugged. "Sounded mechanical to me. Maybe someone's flushing the Bakelite pumps?"

"Maybe..." It didn't sound like a pump, Frank thought. It sounded kinda like... well... a growl or a scream of some kind. He looked up at Unit One. The Evangelion remained still within its bindings.

***

Above Tokyo-3.

"You can open your eyes now, you know."

Shinji decided to finish vomiting before he took that piece of advice. He horked one last time onto the steel grate floor beneath his hands and knees.

"I'm not cleaning that up," an unfamiliar male voice stated flatly.

He waited until his head stopped spinning, then opened his eyes. Shinji found himself inside the cargo hold of a plane. He could hear the rumble of jet engines and feel his ears ache from the change in air pressure. A short distance away, Mari pulled off her own plastic harness. Behind her, the mech sat against the hold's wall, its legs folded beneath its body. A deflated balloon lay discarded nearby, still attached to the robot's shoulders by thick cables.

"Awwwww. These were cute, too..." Mari examined her stockings, now torn and worn away in several places. (She'd somehow retained her pink glasses. His own brainy specs, he realized to his chagrin, were long gone.) She noticed Shinji looking at her and grinned. "See anything you like, Shinji-kun?"

Shinji ignored his own blush and glared at her. "Why did you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Why did you stab the Doctor? He was trying to help you!"

"Hmmm...." Mari put a finger on her chin and looked up, as if trying to concentrate. "To see if I could, I guess? Oh, and he did ask me for the knife, didn't he?" She giggled.

Shinji looked into her vacant eyes -- devoid of any real emotion -- and swallowed. Oh, boy...

"And this too!" She looked down and examined a hole in her skirt. "Blehhh. Q-chan, can you patch this for me?"

The other voice from before sighed. "For the thousandth time, woman, I am not your bloody maid."

A young black man stood on the other side of the hold, his arms crossed. He looked to be about Shinji's age -- or, at least, what was left of him did. Both his legs and his left arm had been replaced with robotic limbs -- large, bulky things, with open panels and wires hanging out, nothing like the more elegant prosthetics Shinji had seen around Tokyo-3. He bore a long scar on his face that extended from just underneath his right ear down to his chin, and wore a red-and-white football jersey with one sleeve cut short to accommodate his implants.

"Awwwww, but Q-chan!" Mari pouted. (Wait. Not that it was easy for Shinji to tell through the translation circuit, but was she using Japanese honorifics while speaking English? Huh. That was sort of weird, wasn't it?) She crossed over to the other boy and leaned in close. "Maybe I could give you something in exchange? A kiss? Something even better?"