From: mew3point14@doramail.com (Daniel Snyder) "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful bride. She knew love, and she knew what it was to be loved. But she was proud, too, and resolved not to give herself to anyone. "On day of her wedding, she was dressed in her most beautiful gown and surrounded by everyone she loved. But she frowned, because she was proud and she had only half-chosen her husband-to-be. Although she knew him by the word of others, she had never seen his face. "'Smile and love your husband,' they all shouted, 'smile and love your husband.' And the longer she did not smile, the louder they shouted, and the more impatient everyone became. "Finally, she swallowed her pride and smiled weakly. In that moment, her bridegroom came to her. She saw him for the first time. "He was beautiful to look upon, and charming in his bearing. Willingly, she smiled then. Willingly, she married him. "What was the name of the bride?" -- "My name is Akagi Ritsuko. Akagi is my mother's maiden name, it's written 'Red Tree'. I have no father. I prefer to think of the anonymous sperm donor who gave me 23 chromosomes as my 'biological pater'. I'm not sure exactly what possessed my mother to conceive me. She's told me that it was intentional, that I was wanted; and I believe her, though that doesn't answer the question. My mother's career, and hence my own, have been marked with acts that I can best call 'madness' for no more technical term. My mother ran away from home and lived on the streets for four years before placing first in her testing center for the university placement exams. She completed her bachelor's degree in three years, then two PhD's in four. After being thrown out of a government job interview for spitting on the interviewer--that's his story, my mother never told me her side--she joined a ragtag group of scientists that were intent on discovering the inner forces of the universe. Their collective name was ROSA. Rose. "The idea behind this group was simple. Certain constants govern the universe as we know it. Fusion in a star, for example, would not be able to proceed if boron did not resonate at a particular frequency. The Big Bang would have yielded a terrific amount of hydrogen, maybe some helium, but nothing more if that number was too high--fusion of lighter elements into heavier elements would not be possible. ROSA wanted to identify these fundamental constants, investigate how it was that they arose, and find if there was any way to harness their powers for the benefit of humanity. "My mother joined the group and immediately fell afoul of a woman by the name of Ikari Yui. In her defense, as far as I know this Ikari-okusan never _did_ anything _to_ my mother. Quite the opposite. Ikari-okusan never failed to give my mother credit where credit was due, and she even suggested new directions for my mother to investigate. Some she did, most she did not. My mother's conflict with Ikari Yui was entirely personal. There was some aspect of Ikari-okusan's persona that my mother abhorred and eventually came to hate. "I've thought about the two of them, quite a bit recently. I get the general impression that there was no one aspect of Ikari-okusan that my mother took offense at. My conclusion is that it was her approach to science itself that was so objectionable. It's not much of a jump from there to argue that Ikari-okusan acted on intuition more than on experimental data. "Let me now explain my reasoning. I know for a fact that intuition was one means of investigating the natural world my mother did not have anything to do with. If someone could not back up their suppositions with data, out went the hypothesis, no further investigation, no questions asked. Intuition, I should add, is something that I dislike myself. I've always been an experimentalist, and I think I always will be. "But I've digressed. At ROSA my mother met Ikari Yui, and two months later was pregnant with me. "I was born on November 21, eighteen years ago this autumn. My first memories are of my toilet training. I was a year and a half old. My early memories are filled with my hard-working mother and mountains of books. I was reading them to myself by the time I was three. By age five I had taught myself enough kanji to learn basic math. There was never any question that I would not go to school like other children. A school would only slow down my intellectual maturity. I had to be free to learn, not hindered by other, dumber children. "After a time, I was begging the men and women around me to teach me themselves. Most did, and were pleasantly surprised by the results. Katsuragi, Dirac, Guaff, and even Ikari-okusan taught me a few things. She seemed especially interested in philosophy, and wanted me to read books by Idel and Scholem. I found them rather trivial, filled with useless history and a rather naive approach to mathematics. I don't know why she picked those books, maybe it was because she had her own baby by then. She was going soft and sentimental. "I learned quite a bit more from her husband. I remember, very early on, thinking of Ikari Gendou as a businessman. It certainly seemed like he never did the kind of work my mother and her colleagues did. He was busy all day with meetings and talking about finance. Later in my life, my mother said that he was a scientist as much as anyone was, but I don't know what his research was on. All I know is that he had enough time on his hands for meetings and to teach me about accountancy. "I believe I was nine when Ikari-okusan disappeared. By that time, I was dimly aware of the antipathy my mother had for her. Still, everyone seemed shocked that she had 'disappeared without a trace', and...I half- recall...people being concerned about Ikari Shinji's fate at that same time. It's odd, because I cannot recall ever having met him, or any occasion when he would have come into work and we would have met. "I wonder, I wonder, do you know what I wonder? I wonder when all the other scientists would have known him from? They had to have known him well to be worried about what was going to happen to him. I don't know... "About that time, coincidentally, my mother started asking me not to come into certain parts of the lab. At great length, I was barred from coming in to work at all, and was forced to continue my education from home. My mother told me that Katsuragi, the mycologist, had made some important discovery about how plants utilize the energy from their environment, and that it was too big for ROSA to deal with. I argued with her, telling her that she should just get rid of it, and then I could come and see her again. Imagine, a nine-year-old girl arguing with her mother! I think she was proud of me--in a way--but also acutely embarrassed. Rationality won the day. My mother explained that they had no choice but to continue the experiments, or there would be no way for them to start over. There was logic to that, and I agreed reluctantly to stay at home. I thought myself a foolish child. Looking back...I don't know. Even knowing what I know now. Or maybe as the result of what I know now. "It was the beginning of the end. That next April, when the school term started, I began to attend school with the normal children at Feuervogel Academy. And by attend, I should explain that I showed up every day for classes and made halfhearted efforts to learn. Languages and history held no interest for me. The math and science courses covered material I was far beyond. Art was only useful for drafting, and Physical Education for my health. "Lastly, there was the student body itself. I'm not going to mince my words when I say that the students here are a freak show. There is sexual perversion and drug use in the hallways, suicides from the rooftops, apathy and disgust in the classrooms, and I don't want to know about what goes on behind closed doors. I've heard rumors. I've seen some pretty odd things. But you have to remember, I had been coming from almost a decade of home schooling when I set foot into Feuervogel. To me, this was the norm. I was the strange one because I was smart, and had an interest in learning, and respected the teachers. The scales didn't start falling out of my eyes until my first letter home, when I told my mother that my roommate--who was no older than me--was leaving school because her relationship with her French teacher was becoming abusive. "The reply I got from my mother at length was the last I ever heard from her. Her letter began, 'One can esist in the fifth dimension and the third as easily as a line can be found inside a cube. Fi one were to do so, one would be freed from causality from the perspective of a three- dimensional observer. Could we be free and still have an identity?' Quite a thought problem, isn't it? "The letter explained to me finally what ROSA's research direction had taken. Ikari-san, Rokubungi Gendou, was proposing that energy be stored in five-dimensional hypervolumes. They would have the advantages of infinite portability, accessability and security. The problem was that nobody knew what would happen if they put one of these hypervolumes into use. The effects might be five-dimensional. A disaster might not only _ensue_ from, but precede, their activity. "The letter...it was strange. My mother discussed energy in a different way than I've heard anyone talk about it before. Sometimes it sounded like a potential energy, sometimes a kinetic, and sometimes like matter imbued with the same energetic qualities it has at the quantum level. Sometimes, it sounded like common sense was turned right on its head--my mother seemed to think that we would have to put this energy into use before we could generate it. "The reply I got from my mother at length was the last I ever heard from her. She committed suicide late in December of my eleventh year. She leapt off of a building, weighted down with lead weights. The toxicologist's report showed that she had ingested heroin shortly before she took her life. Madness... "The tone of that last letter, coupled with the severity lurking behind it, cast me into a period of angst and self-imposed isolation. I would like to think of myself like the phoenix, shortly rising from the ashes of my old life, purified. I soon hated everyone here at the school. That's not quite true. It wasn't hate so much as a highly refined contempt. No-one was my equal, therefore nobody was worthy of my time or friendship. And it wasn't everyone, either. When Professor Fuyutsuki came to the school, we remembered each other, and he helped me pull up a few grades that would have held me back. That's how I met Maya: when she failed PE her first year I counciled her. I introduced her to Juri who got her into shape. "Before long I'd built my own little group of peers and teachers who I could relate to and depend on. We learned together, we helped each other. And I gradually grew out of my contemptuousness, kind of. I had something better than contempt, I had pity. I saw where each one of the youth around me had fallen, had become second-rate human beings. Nice, straight-forward psychology and logic. Everything was brilliant. The world was divided into two camps, those who could understand what was going on and those who were doomed. "Two and a half years ago I began to receive your letters. I remember the first one vividly, because I was walking back from class with Misato, and she recognized the envelope from Ryouji-san's mailbox. He'd been getting them and refusing to show her, she said. I took it up to my room and we read it, curious. I recognized the cursive writing as Romaji, but I still couldn't make sense of it. The message said, 'I want what you feel, believe me...turn the current on. Michimoto Wakamugi.' The funny...I don't know, it's embarrassing to admit, but the first thing I did was look back at the books Ikari-okusan had given me so long ago. It sounded like the sort of thing you'd read in one of those books. Naturally, there was nothing there that had anything to do with currents. So much for intuition. "Once my head was screwed on right, I got hold of Kaji and had a look at his notes. 'They'll say my mission changed the world and I stood proud. The underground will rise and save this world, we'll change the world, we'll all stand proud.' That sort of thing. He'd been getting them for several weeks by the time we spoke. "As the letters continued to arrive, and Makoto-kun landed on the strange mailing list, we charted out a pattern in the subjects. There were at least three players: a silent woman who had been the victim of mistreatment, a young man who had fallen on bad times, and an organization that the two of them belonged to. The obvious choice for the role of Shekhinah, the woman, was Ayanami Rei. She'd been hanging around the school for years, and nobody seemed to care about her. She had no family as far as we could tell. One day, she just popped up out of thin air. It was perfect, nobody could have built it better. For Rahamim, the male character, we chose Suzuhara Touji. I knew about his history, and as long as we kept him in the dark, the other four of us didn't seen any harm in his rising to the role. Of course, we would have told him if we could have, but it was essential that he not understand the larger part he played. "Ayanami as Shekhinah, Touji as Rahamim, and we were ha-Tiqqun, the larger organization that both of them were...are...affiliated with. The blocks were falling into place. These last few weeks have been truly exciting ones. The revolution is just now coming into being. What we've been struggling to understand, the hard work in preparing the stage...oh," she gasped, "it's thrilling. It's wonderful to watch everything burst up alive, like..." "...like a rose in bloom," Michimoto finished. He leaned forward and said, "Deeper. I want you to go deeper." "But that's all there is," Akagi said. She glanced about for a cigarette package for a few moments before returning, stymied, to her seat. She looked at Michimoto Wakamugi with defiant amusement and said again, "That's all there is. There isn't anything more to it." "You said something about madness," he replied, putting a slight edge on the word. "Talk to me about madness." "I must've misspoke," Akagi said absently. "I overreacted. It's not real madness, like you'd be locked up for. It's just a bunch of personal eccentricities. My mother's running away when she was a girl. My smoking. I mean, who starts smoking when they're fifteen? In the end, it's only the two of us who have been harmed." "You look at your mother," Michimoto observed, "and you look at yourself, and you see madness. Suicide, murder, one cycle of the moon between birthday and death day. Go deeper. Madness flows like an underground river. Dig and swim." >From out of thin air it seemed, Michimoto produced an American cigarette in between the bony fingers of his left hand. He handed it to Akagi, who took it without thinking. With his other hand, he reached into his pants pocket and drew out a gold lighter. Akagi leaned forward to light the cigarette. A moment later she was drawing in her first breath, and the tip of the cigarette was flaring orange. Michimoto leaned away from her, closing the cigarette lighter with a snap. Her first breath taken, Akagi Ritsuko stared at the cigarette and thought about madness. The smoke rose on the air currents, dancing, twisting. "You could call it...a propensity...for sudden outbursts of the irrational. Logic and reason haven't overcome it all. We're all only human. Still subjects of evolution of a sort. When I was small, my favorite thing to do was to run through the building, going to each bathroom in turn and flushing each toilet one after another. I knew it was a foolish thing to do even then. I'd wait until everyone was out of one bathroom, and then I'd run in there, flush a toilet, watch it cycle through, then move into the next stall. And I'd do them all in order. I'd start at the top of the building, and work my way down to the subbasements. Floor by floor, flushing each one of the toilets. And if there was somebody in one of the bathrooms, I'd just wait until they were gone before I went in there and began the flushing routine. I can't remember when I stopped doing it. Probably before I was six. "I've thought about it now, and...here's the explanation I've come up with. My earliest memories are my mother toilet training me. I know that I was less than two at the time. I know also that we didn't spend a great deal of time as mother and daughter, so I imagine that those times in the bathroom together must have been fairly intimate, and would have made quite an impression on any young girl. So I was associating some aspect of the intimacy with the events of toilet training. It would've been weird, don't you think, if it was...you know, crapping, that I made the association with. I believe it was the flushing sound. The sound that let me know I'd been a good girl, and I'd left something in the toilet, and my mother was proud of me. "So my rushing through the building, flushing the toilets, was really..." "...because you're a crazy lonesome woman desperate for affection," Michimoto finished. Akagi dropped the cigarette from her hand onto the bedroom floor. She was frozen, ashen. Without acknowledging her reaction, he swept on. "But there are a lot of crazy lonesome women out there. Let's go deeper. Talk more about madness. Let's talk about that dress that you made." She had recovered enough of her composure to think to grind the burning butt out on the floor. "It...it was...part of...the plan," she stammered. "I only wanted to recover Shekhinah. I thought that if she was humiliated in front of everyone, then Ikari would be too afraid to be seen in public with her, and we could..." "Yes?" The former executive vice president remained silent. Michimoto watched her, likewise silent, as he pulled a coin out of his pocket and practiced some sleight-of-hand tricks. After returning the coin he continued. "You don't know what you were going to do next. That certainly does not explain why you threw a bowlful of punch on her. But that wasn't the dress I was talking about. I meant the seifuku you made for Ikari and left outside of Feuervogel for him to find. Why did you do that? You had control of Shekhinah. There was no reason to push Ikari away further." Akagi Ritsuko swallowed heavily. With moistening eyes, she gasped, "I don't know...I just...got angry. Maybe...maybe I am crazy. Maybe..." "So what if you are?" She looked up sharply. Michimoto glowered at her and spoke again. "You certainly seem capable of functioning in society. Even if something went wrong, Ibuki would be there for you. Or Dr. Fuyutsuki. Or someone. Someone would be there to catch you from doing harm." A silence so profound, the feeling that descends upon a house when all who have ever lived in its walls are dead, enveloped the room. Minutes passed, while Akagi frantically traced out the circuitry of thought, before her hope boiled away in mental clouds of steam. She said softly, "There was this one time... "I'd heard about it in a book. I was curious. I'd promised poor Touji he could come over and we'd talk. I took him back to my room. He was thrilled, of course. We came up here, and I asked him if I could try hypnotizing him. He liked the idea. I didn't tell him I'd never hypnotized anyone before, but I knew what I was doing. "It took me a try or two to get him relaxed, but when he did, everything went beautifully. I told him to cluck like a chicken, and he did. I told him he was watching the funniest movie he'd ever seen, and he started rolling on the floor, laughing. It was all pretty pathetic. "Then, just before I brought him out of the trance, I gave him...I commanded him to, when he was leaving the room, I'd say his name, and then he'd stomp his right foot really hard, three times. Then I brought him out. I asked him if he could remember anything. He said no, not really. We laughed about it. He had a good sense of humor about it. "So we chatted about it for a few minutes, and then I casually hinted he might want to go. As he was leaving...I said to him, 'Touji.' And he stomped his foot, wham wham wham, just like that. Then I said to him, 'Why'd you do that?' And he gave me this confused look for a moment...then he...he actually brightened up, and smiled, and said something about how he saw a roach running by. "He left, and...and I was horrified. I really was. Because...I suddenly didn't know whether I was seeing imaginary roaches. I mean...what if we're all crazy? What if we really don't understand anything that's going on around us? What if we're just making this shit up as we go along, we really have no clue, and all of human behavior is just trying to make some sense out this jumbled-up nonsense of reality?" "But there's hope, isn't there?" Ritsuko lifted her head up to look at Michimoto. Triumphant, he went on. "You are the cigarette, slowly burning, slowly being lost to the air. You think that it's only a matter of time before you are gone, and then you will do nothing but cry and cry. But it doesn't have to be like this. When you've lost faith in governments, and organizations, and religions, and everything else there is in the world, you're really at the beginning. Submit to your own nature, and you will walk with God. Come with me." He put out his hand, smiling. Slowly, refusing to believe, Akagi rose; then she put out her own hand and let him wrap his fingers around hers. She took her first steps on the road to madness. The walked towards the door. "We'll change the world," he said reassuringly, "there's a revolution calling you." -- Gasping on their own bile, Ayanami Rei and Ikari Shinji followed the remains of the dead body down the main hallway. It began with the feet, half-shod in expensive leather shoes, lying just past the front door. The feet were separated from the rest of the body at the ankles. Flared out in a macabre blossom, the tendons and muscles of the left ankle lay a few centimeters away, still attached to the lower leg. The legs-- Kaji's legs, though neither resident knew--were frozen forever in a kind of a kick, with the left leg pointed down and the right perpendicular to it. Both legs were still in the white uniform trousers. However, both the knees and the hips had been disarticulated, and so several centimeters of the lower torso stuck out into plain view, peeking up over the belt. Unrecognizable chunks of flesh, bone and organ were strewn down the hallway to the door at its end. Battling inner horror, Shinji led Rei down the hall and pushed the door open. Although pieces of the corpse could still be found beyond the doorway, the two student's eyes were held by the sight of Kaji's torso itself. It lay like a husk, dried of all of its blood, in one corner of the hallway. A swath, roughly a cylinder, of the body had been scooped out, exposing the spine and the back of the rib cage to the open air. Kaji's hands and arms were untouched, and they lay palms-up on either side of the torso. The Seal of the Living Rose was missing from Kaji's left ring finger. His head was nowhere to be seen. Written in blood across the front of Shinji's door was the following simple message: SHINJI HE IS WAITING FOR YOU IN THE DUELING ARENA. -- At that same moment, across campus, Ibuki Maya made a truly damning discovery.