It should have been easy to handle a body that was basically a larger form of his own, but as Shinji had learned during his first piloting experience it was not. Mass and inertia did not scale up proportionally with size.
It was like hitting a 90 feet growth spurt overnight. None of his instincts worked and if the giant body had not supplied his own set of instincts, reflexes and automatisms Shinji would have had to learn to walk all over again before he could fight the angel. As it was Shinji had been clumsy enough that his first fight had almost killed him.
He hoped that things would work out better today.
Slowly he stepped out of the elevator building.
The street in front of his school had changed, too. There were no cars or people left and sings and streetlights were laying flat on the ground. In the distance he could make out traffic lights folding out of the way.
They had cleared a runway for them.
Stepping into the middle of the road Shinji repeated what the trick that he had learned in the last time and his robot changed into a jet.
The other robot stepped up to his side and he suddenly could here Rei's voice inside his head:
"I can't replicate you maneuver," she said, "you will have to explain to me how the transformation process is activated."
Was Rei a telepath? It head to be a radio connection between the robots that got directly synchronized to his mind.
"Ayanami?" he thought concentrating on her, "can you hear me?"
"I am receiving you without problem, Pilot Ikari," Rei replied, "please transmit to me how you transformed."
"You have to... ," Shinji began and then stopped again.
It was hard to put it in human words. He tried to visualize what he had done to come up with a good way to describe it replaying the scenes several times over in his mind.
Suddenly Rei interrupted his thoughts with a short "Understood!" and transformed her robot into a jet just like Shinji's.
This was scary. Apparently the link was far more versatile and deeper than he had thought. Shinji tried not to think of anything that Rei might object to, but like a herd of pink elephants thoughts of Rei in her skintight plugsuit trampled through the back of his mind.
If Rei received any of theses thought she did not let on. Instead she started her engine and launched into the sky. Shinji hurried to keep up.
Shinji was already wondering if she might have caught some of the thoughts and was now ignoring him when she contacted him again calm and unemotional as ever.
"The transformation sequence appears to be a function of the quarantined main processor. It should not have been possible to circumvent the blocks to access them." Rei informed him.
Shinji had no idea what that meant and if it was a good or a bad thing, but at least Rei was still talking to him.
He followed her lead an together they were flying out of the city.
During his last flight in the Eva Shinji had not had much thought to spare on anything but the angel that he was fighting, but now that he was sedately cruising along at supersonic speed he became aware of several strange sensations.
In addition to the strange telepathic link to Rei he had several new senses. Radar and other sensors. He was aware of the heat-seeking missiles he carried under his wings and the variable-caliber machine gun build into his Eva. There was also the faint sensation that he associated with the 'teleportation' stunt he had done before. He wondered if he should show that trick to Rei too, so they could get to their destination faster, but he was not quite sure how it really worked and something told him that the range was limited in any way.
"The enemy is near" Rei let him know in a transmission accompanied by an awareness of the direction he should turn.
There was indeed something there. Zooming his view in the direction that Rei had indicated Shinji could make out an airborne form. But it was not an angel like he had fought before or an jet like theirs. In fact the thing it most looked like was....
"A flying dinosaur!" Shinji exclaimed.
"Not a dinosaur. The enemy's form is that of a pterodactyl, a flying reptile that lived concurrently with the dinosaurs. But this creature just shares it's shape and is mechanic not organic in origin." Rei corrected pedantically.
"It is Mecha-Rodan!" Shinji concluded.
While he was still trying to come to grips with the appearance of the fearsome flying beast in the back of his mind or rather the robots mind another function activated. He could see a strange red symbol in his minds eye. It must have been an 'Identification Friend or Foe' system because he suddenly was filled with the assurance that this was an enemy.
As if this horribly beast could have been anything else.
Just like Rei's voice had appeared inside his head without even pretending to have come via the robots audio sensors a strange sort of heads-up display filled his vision without actually blocking his view.
It had to be some sort of war-book entry, but Shinji could not understand most of the alien concepts. There was a lot of information that was completely useless to him and a list of eight attributes that he did not quite know how to interpret. The only thing that made any sense was the well fitting designation. A concept he understood to mean the act of rushing down and snatching something.
Their opponent was called a Swoop.
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(Posted Thu, 27 Jan 2005 15:06)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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