Chapter 12: The Illusory Passage, Terminus

Chapter 12:
The Illusory Passage,
Terminus

 

THE DISPLACEMENT JUMP went on a long time, and silence stretched between Shinji and Rei Quatre.

Her pleas had sent them on this journey to an unknown destination where no one would be and no one would come.

Within the root-like corridor, Shinji had difficulty perceiving what was around him, but he could sense that the passage was narrowing.

On and on it narrowed, extending farther and farther. Shinji could do nothing but wait to be expelled into some desolate place.

Just when he was thinking the road must be nearing its end, Kaworu’s voice came to him unbidden.

I’m glad you didn’t spill out of your human vessel… Though perhaps your current situation doesn’t call for celebration.

Where are you? Shinji asked.

Kaworu wasn’t actually in the tunnel, but Shinji thought he felt him point to the Q.R. Signum in his chest.

You’re the lead actor, Kaworu said, you’re supposed to be in the spotlight. And yet you’re here, under the stage, where the stagehands scurry about.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Shinji demanded. In response, his ears began to ring.

He realized Kaworu was laughing.

This was only supposed to be an interlude. You’ve outperformed my expectations.

Kaworu’s voice began to distort. The ringing in Shinji’s ears rose in pitch and intensity.

“It’s…too much.”

Shinji felt himself begin to black out.

In the next instant, he was nearly himself again.

He’d emerged from the tunnel.

Much to Shinji’s surprise, there was air where he came out. He’d assumed he was being transported to somewhere even farther than the moon—maybe some remote planet, like Venus or Mars. But no, he was seemingly still on Earth.

The surrounding area was dry and desolate—not unlike the Atlas Mountains.

“Kaworu-kun?” Shinji asked, but he no longer sensed his presence. His remote-transmission friend always conversed on his own terms.

Once the ringing in his ears and the pain in his chest had eased a little, Shinji drained the LCL from the plug.

Quatre’s hair and work uniform had been swaying like aquatic plants in a fish tank, but as the fluid gradually lowered, they pressed flat against her skin. No longer buoyant, her body sank deep into the plug seat.

As Shinji stood beside her, the weight came back to his legs. He lifted his heels and broke their adhesion to the wet floor.

 

Shinji ejected the plug. Just as he was about to open the hatch, an alarm sounded. It was the environmental sensor.

“A decompression sickness warning? Why would that be an issue?”

The display indicated low air pressure outside—on par with the atmosphere atop a tall mountain.

A sudden change in pressure could be dangerous, particularly after time spent in the LCL. Then the AI announced another hazard—high radiation—and a recommendation to avoid prolonged exposure. At first, Shinji thought he might have been transported to a former nuclear test site, a nuclear waste repository, or something along those lines, but according to the computer, the radiation didn’t match a human-made source. Apparently, these were cosmic rays from above.

Without exiting, Shinji opened the hatch, and bright sunlight illuminated the chamber—but the air was cold. The atmospheric pressure was low, the sky a bluish black. Are we on a high-altitude plateau, maybe?

Shinji didn’t see the swollen moon anywhere, but he didn’t have a full view of the sky, nor did he know what direction he faced.

But something else was odd.

“The Longinus Ring is gone.”

 

“Super Eva to Mobile Command.”

Shinji tried to establish a connection through the wireless transmitter, but no reply came. He couldn’t pick up any guide beacons belonging to the stratospheric airplane network. In fact, all the signals had gone quiet.

Shinji looked away from the blindingly bright exterior and back to the relative darkness inside the plug.

“Quatre,” he asked, “where are we?”

Her terse reply came from the shadows. “A distant place.”

“Distant how?” Shinji asked, annoyed. “Tell me where we are.”

“In a distant place… Aren’t we? Where is this?”

“I’m asking you.”

This conversation was going nowhere. He sighed, his breath turning white.

It’s like hopping onto a train without knowing where it’s going…and deciding to stay on until the last stop.

Where have I heard that before?

He was thinking back to when he’d first arrived at Nerv.

I ran away, but Tokyo-3 was mostly on lockdown, and I couldn’t get anywhere. I bounced around between the city and the foothills. And that was when I met Kensuke.

Back then, Shinji hadn’t known how to cope with his Eva and the people around him. And now, Rei Quatre seemed to be struggling in much the same way, except she was also dealing with a deluge of unfamiliar emotions, and the trauma of being shackled by Armaros.

At the side terminal, Shinji entered the command to transmit a distress signal and muttered, “So, does that mean I’m Kensuke today? What a fine turn of events.”

Quatre gave him a puzzled look.

Not sure what to do, are you? Shinji thought. Well, what did you bring us here for?

 

Shinji groaned. “Why did this happen?” To Quatre, he said, “So, we’re here. Somewhere far away, just like you wanted. Are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied?” Quatre asked. “I don’t know what that feels like. When the one of me was split into four, I was afraid. I knew fear. Commander Ikari was gone. You didn’t choose me. Though I didn’t realize that until I learned how to be afraid.”

She’d been sitting in the pilot’s chair—not by choice but simply because that’s where Shinji had put her—but the cold air had begun to freeze her wet clothes, and she curled forward, shivering.

“I want instrumentality,” Quatre said. “You’re the one who chose this world for us, Ikari-kun—and without you, maybe our world won’t have to end. Maybe we could try the Human Instrumentality Project again.”

“I get it now,” Shinji said. He placed a hand on his chest, where his heart had been before she’d melted him with her Eva’s laser.

“But I was wrong,” she said. “The black giant won’t change his decision. The world will be reconstructed. But if I could just get you far enough away—outside the world, even—then maybe…”

She let the thought trail off, and he filled in the rest. “Maybe we could let the apocalypse go on without us. Is that it? And who knows, with me out of the picture, he might change his mind after all, right?”

She buried her head in her knees and nodded.

“Ikari-kun…I’m cold.”

Shinji closed the hatch and slid his finger across the temperature control to turn up the heat.

 

Super Eva walked across dry land. There was nothing green. The earth rose and fell in monotonous brown waves across the seemingly endless plateau. He had no GPS—the satellites had long since scattered, due to the Earth’s weakening gravitational pull. The topography didn’t match anything in his geological database, and nobody replied to his transmissions. Shinji began to take measurements of the sun’s angle to try and get even a rough approximation of his location. He realized something was off.

Even after several hours, the shining sun hadn’t moved from its zenith.

The planet wasn’t rotating.