2010-07-17 - Cutscene: Impotent and Sterile

She was naked, surrounded by a ring of great booming stones that insulted her and broke her down and pressed their fingers into her mouth past her soft palate through flesh and bone and into the back of her brain where their disgusting coarse greasy sensation lingered and made her feel cheap and stupid.

- We wish to proceed peacefully.

- We don't wish you to suffer from insults anymore.

I don't feel any insult she lies.

- A strong tempered woman.

- It's quite natural for Ikari to keep her close.

- However, it was none other than Ikari-kun who presented you to us.

- Rejecting the interrogation of the pilot of Unit-00, he presented you as her replacement, Dr. Akagi.

She's Rei's replacement?

It's later now but it's earlier in the important places and time has stopped meaning as much in the traditional sense, which is a common symptom of those who look toward the future and see nothing but a blank dark space.

Thoughts have taken a bit of a backseat because suddenly flesh dominates her perception, the feeling of metal pressed to her back as an old friend threatens her with what she perhaps has really wanted all along. You say this is the core for the dummy plug? I'll show you the truth, she says, and she doesn't care anymore because she's going to take all of them out with her. The feeling of those slabs refusing to eye her sticks with her and she hasn't felt this weirdly alive in a long time, as if electricity has come from another planet and rooted itself in the base of her spinal column.

Sixteen years ago, a god was punished here: the body system, a factory, human-shaped, and humans contain Rei--

Soft flesh rips apart, dissolving like sugar in coffee, the amber LCL making it all orange instead of red and pink and porcelain and blue. Smiles fix still even as teeth drift away from cloven jaws, and the tank in some spots resembles a sea of breasts, and pieces float away from one another, imitating new creatures, dissolving genitals floating like a dying jellyfish, bones rubbery and hingeless, expanses of flesh billowing as they

(Nothing is left of her head but a long scrap of skin with hair and lips and broken fragments of skull. Her spine launches out of her body so hard that it breaks her chair. No fingers or toes survive -- the body parts that remain fundamentally intact just resemble hunks of raw meat.)

- These are dummies. And nothing but parts for Rei. Humans found a god, and thus tried to obtain it. As a result, humanity was punished. That was 16 years ago. The god that they found vanished. However, they tried to revive the god themselves. It was Adam. A human was made from Adam to be close to the god. That is Eva. Eva, which originally didn't have a soul, now has a human soul. All of these were salvaged. However the vessel which truly contains a soul is Rei. Only she has a soul. None of the other vessels have a soul. These Rei-like things here don't have a soul. Nothing but vessels. So I'll destroy them, because I hate them.

It's only now, sitting in her office, putting out another cigarette, all feeling in her body gone, that Ritsuko Akagi realizes the wider effects of what she's done.