[Episode 131588] [Episode 131588]She looked at the blue haired girl suspiciously for a moment.
"You don't consider what happens during piloting fun, do you?" she asked carefully.
Rei gave her a pointed look. Actually Rei looked at her the same way she always looked at anything, but Asuka thought that it was meant to be a pointed look.
"I merely thought that you would appreciate a guided tour of the geofront including some of the less public areas. The commander is in the habit of restricting much of the information involved on a need to know basis and she likely has some rather minimal notions about what a pilot might need to know," Rei told her.
That made sense to Asuka. Commander Ikari and her mother would probably try to keep as much from her as they could and at NERV what you did not know could have the nasty habit of biting you in the ass — well, not exactly biting and not just the ass. But you tended to end up getting screwed if you were not careful.
They started their tour in the Pilots locker room. Asuka did not really think that anybody would have kept its location from her if she had asked real nicely, but it was still good to know where it was.
"Few people realize that the pilots are technically part of NERV's operations branch with the according ranks and uniforms," Rei explained.
She got out two sets of NERV uniforms of the sort that Asuka had seen on some of the female NERV personnel. Lt. Ibuki, Dr. Akagi's henchwoman, for example had worn an uniform just like this. The set that Rei handed her included shoes stockings and even underwear.
"We are less likely to be stopped and questioned if we dress accordingly," Rei elaborated her reason for the dress change.
As the two girls began to strip Asuka mused about the usefulness of uniforms. She had noticed this phenomenon before. Uniforms conferred instant authority on their wearer often overruling any common sense and independent thought in people. It did not have to be military or police uniforms, any kind of professional work clothes would do. Putting on a labcoat to turn into scientist or wearing white in a hospital or putting on a hardhat on a construction site it all worked the same. A clipboard and a determined expression could be added to deter people who actually were the genuine article from questioning you.
She had thought that it had been a mostly German phenomenon but Japan was even worse. They even had school uniforms to put everyone in their place.
Her ruminations were mostly an attempt to distract herself from the blue-haired girl undressing next to her. There had been some embarrassing thoughts in her head when the two of them had last been naked together and after rationalizing them as having been the result of LCL exposure Asuka was not keen on giving herself any chance to think something like that again without having a good excuse.
As she examined the almost indecently short uniform-skirt to keep herself from examining the naked Rei indecently bending over besides her she noticed something peculiar about the uniforms.
Several of the seams were definitely odd.
"What are those for," Asuka asked, "Is that some sort of Velcro? It looks like they would rip apart easily."
Rei who was just in the process of pulling up a white stocking turned to Asuka.
"This is a design feature," she explained, "there have been incidents in the past when the durability of the uniforms proved to be a disadvantage. To address these concern faults have been incorporated into the material so they will rupture under lower tension at predetermined spots and not allow pressure to build up to levels that could be harmful to the wearer."
There was a German engineering term for that kind of thinking: 'Sollbruchstelle', but Asuka had never heard of using something like it to make it easier to rip clothes from a person so the wearer would not get welts or marks from having them ripped of their body.
She wondered what sort of work-environment would lead to such an idea. She was especially concerned that the design philosophy had even been adhered to in the underwear.
Asuka got more clues to the nature of the work environment as they visited an storage area that held Evangelion spare-parts during the first part of their tour. Many of the parts were stored in what Rei explained to be LCL-vats to keep them fresh.
What drew Asuka's eye were the warning labels affixed everywhere. She would not have thought that you could represent the concept of "Warning: Strong Aphrodisiaca" in such a minimalized way, but the pictogram managed to graphically illustrate the likely consequences of getting in contact with the stuff. The other warning label with a tentacle sneaking out of a vat towards an incautious stick figure spoke for itself.
All the women working in here — there seemed to be no males in this area — walked softly as if on eggshells and were constantly shooting wary looks everywhere. All in all it had an air of tension and safety consciousness rarely seen outside of overworked bomb-disposal squats.
Asuka was glad to be out of the place when they left.
Their next stop further down in the bowels of NERV was a place named Central Dogma. Rei stopped them in front of a door labeled "LCL Production Plant".
"The term production plant in this case is perhaps intentionally misleading," Rei told her, "the LCL is not really produced here, but rather gained in a process more accurately described as milking. we could go in and have a look if you like, but I am afraid that quite heavy safety procedures would be necessary and there really is not all that much to see."
Asuka looked doubtful on the one hand she was naturally curious on the other hand she felt that Rei had already told her more than she ever wanted to know about the subject. In fact she would not have minded having the idea of 'milking for LCL' and the accompanying pictures that her vivid imagination was supplying erased from her memories.
Her gaze fell upon a row of extremely complicated environmental suits of a kind Asuka had not encountered since she went to see "Outbreak - The Musical".
"What do they need those spacesuits for, are they playing with Ebola in there, too?" Asuka wondered.
"The LCL in that room is quite concentrated and extremely dangerous. It has even saturated the air to a degree so that workers have to use an external supply of fresh air," Rei explained.
"Right that does it!" Asuka decided," we don't need to go in there. In fact we don't really need to mention its existence ever again."
Rei took Asuka's outburst calmly. As calmly as she ever took anything. But then again if you had lived for years in a place like this, were rooms full with LCL hanging in the air like mist were considered normal, you might just exhaust your capability for emotional overreaction.
"Then I suggest we visit the engine room where the power for the Evangelion is generated," Rei suggested.
The engine room turned out to be a large mostly empty room with a high vaulted ceiling. In its center there was a curious metal apparatus not entirely unlike a merry-go-round, but judging from the look of the metal harnesses and the strange machinery surrounding them Asuka doubted that it would be something that innocent. The metal rods that would be at crotch-level of anybody actually strapped into that thing appeared to have a penetrating quality to them.
The large room was deserted aside from a lone female tech and a dozen women in bathrobes with NERV insignia on them and a couple of other women in NERV security uniforms lounging around on benches by the far wall in obvious boredom.
A woman in bathrobe and bunny slippers waved them hello. Rei waved back.
"This is Power-One," Asuka's blue haired guide narrated," the Evangelion receive their energy from here. At all times a group specially trained power technicians will be waiting here for the call to start up the generator. Using their own bodies they will start up the Münchhausen-Mark-IX power tap."
"They drain those women to power the Eva?" Asuka asked shocked.
"Not directly," Rei clarified," they merely provide the initial catalyst to open the gateway and keep the dimensional shunt operational."
"What about the chicks with the guns and ninja-swords?" Asuka found herself asking.
"The special security are here in case anything else tries to get through the shunt. They are professionals," Rei reassured her or at least tried to.
Asuka was not really all that reassured. The idea of something coming through the dimensional energy shunt — whatever that was — made her slightly apprehensive and she urged Rei to move on so that they could get the very sturdy looking steel blast door between them and the power generator.
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