"Honey, I'm serious!"
"Gendo, I think you're finally starting to crack..."
"Yui, I'm not losing it. I have a daughter, her name is Hitagi Senjougahara!"
"No dear, you have a son. His name is Shinji Ikari. Unless you've been hiding something from me for all these years. But thankfully I have the past experience to know that you're dreams go out of control at the touch of a hat."
"...and she has a boyfriend called Koyomi Araragi, who saved her from her disease of weightlessness caught from the crabs."
"For the love of god..." The two scientists sat over the diagram readouts, mumbling to each other over cups of strong coffee. Both looked completely exhausted, and Gendo's eyes danced around the room, his lack of sleep for over seventy-two hours beginning to spark insanity in his mind, whilst his wife looked on disgruntled.
She was used to her husband being a little crazy sometimes, but the lack of sleep to her was testing her patience. Plus, the potential miracle of an experiment they were waiting to test was driving her mad. Having to wait to see the unbelievable that you knew was coming was testing her normally gentle and patient personality.
"...and she had beautiful, long purple hair."
"Gendo! We've got only a few hours before we have to let the kids know the experiments that will change their lives forever. And we sure as hell can't trust Kyoko to do it! Get your head out of your ass and focus!"
"...she was a bit of a bitch though. All tsundere, killed all the cute."
With her blood vessels reaching a critical breaking point, Yui Ikari cracked her husband around the head with a heavy folder.
"You're going to be the death of me one of these days..." Yui mumbled as she massaged her aching head.
-
With the shock of their new homeroom teacher finally beginning to recede, Asuka hung her head behind her chair, staring at the ceiling. She didn't think she could handle more surprises today.
She wanted Shinji's delicious home-cooked bento in her stomach, but lunch was still hours away.
Stomach grumbling, she turned to face Shinji, who happened to sit next to her, flashing him a look of practiced annoyance. His response was a confused expression and a shrug, which wasn't the kind of attention she had been looking for. Tearing out a scrap of paper from her notepad, she quickly began writing a message.
"I'm bored!" Having received it, Shinji quickly read the note and glanced at her, flashing a smile that agreed with her.
"Me too. I'm not paying attention at all. You got any ideas to kill the time?" Asuka thought about the response for a little while, until a small grin crept into her expression.
"Let's play a game!"
"What kind of game?"
"20 questions, gone wild!" Shinji's eyes widened to impossible sizes as he read the response. It was all she could do to not laugh out loud. After she'd received the affirmative from Shinji, she began their little game."Out of all the girls in the class, who's the cutest?"
"That's not a fair question..."
"Answer the damn question, stupid Shinji!"
"A certain fiery fräulein I know..." He had the audacity to look sheepish, but his comment made her happy. At least he had noticed she was an attractive organism of the female species. Pencil in his mouth, Shinji finally came up with a question that surprised her.
"Is there anyone that you like?"
Her heartbeat flared as she struggled to find an immediate answer. She wasn't mentally ready to tell him that she liked him, but one wrong move and she could hint to Shinji that it wasn't him she liked, dashing her hopes of a future relationship entirely.
"If you mean like as in people I can bear with most on a daily basis, I'd have to choose you I guess." After sneaking him the note, she hid her face away from him, afraid she'd let slip her innermost thoughts. She heard a surprised gasp of air coming from his direction, before hearing the pencil scratching on the paper again.
"You write incredibly frustrating answers, I have no idea what that means in the female language." She came close to whacking him across the head with her textbook, but settled with glaring at him as though looks could cause people to spontaneously combust.
"Read too much into it and I'll have you for lunch instead of the damn bento!"As soon as she handed it over, she regretted writing the response. She meant it as something angry, but replaying the words in her head and it began to sound... flirty? Her fears were confirmed when Shinji covered his mouth, trying not to laugh. Whimpering in exasperation, she buried her head in her arms on her desk. The rest of the day passed by in a slow, painful, agonizing fashion.
-
"This is so disappointing."
"Gendo, focus!"
"But, but...!" Gendo Ikari was looking at his son, a mixture of disappointment and fear written over his face. "That's not my precious Hitagi!"
"...what?" Shinji mumbled, incredibly confused at his incomprehensible father's words.
"Hitagi! My daughter!"*WHACK*
The elder Ikari male crumpled to the ground, with Yui Ikari standing over him, a look of pure rage covering her face.
"That's enough! Sleep there for a few minutes, I can do the introduction by myself at least." Both Asuka and Shinji looked suitably horrified. Shinji's mother rarely ever displayed anger, so whenever her rage did display itself, it was terrifying.
"We've brought you here today to explain to you the nature of our experiments. Neither of us have slept for over three days, so your father is going insane and I'm getting a little... irritated." Yui walked over to a nearby laptop connected to the ceiling-mounted projector, flicking everything on. The room dimmed as one of the walls parallel to the two teenagers lit-up with an image.
From what they could tell, they were looking at a simple, white-walled room with nothing inside. There didn't seem to be anything interesting about the room, and Shinji looked at his mother fearfully.
"...maybe you've both been in here a little too long, mother."A fierce look of boiling anger was his response, causing Shinji to whimper like a rabbit, cowering behind Asuka. The german girl had given him enough scary looks that he thought he was ready for anything, but even Asuka herself was shaking in fear.
"Admittedly, it doesn't look like much, but that room is the single, most advanced example of virtual reality engineering in the world. What you're looking at is the room in its default state. I need the both of you to go into that room, and... test its capabilities." After a flick of a switch, a small door materialized underneath the projected image.
"Go." At her encouragement, Asuka and Shinji walked towards the door and pushed it open. The exact same room as they had seen on the projection greeted them.
"Stand in the middle." Yui's voice could now be heard over a communications system, the metallic voice reverberating around the room. As they were told, they stood in the middle of the room, looking at each other with confused faces.As she was typing furiously into the computer, Gendo began to awaken, getting to his feet as held his aching head. Yui noticed the sound of her husband returning to consciousness and swiftly pointed to the projection of the room, now with the two teenagers inside.
"It's your cue." Gendo nodded as he looked towards the projection. Inside the now sealed room, his face appeared before the two children as a small, floating window.
"You are both now inside a virtual reality. However, your bodies are still physical, meaning you will be able to touch anything around you as though it existed in real life."
"We can... touch virtual objects? That's breaking a few laws of physics, isn't it?" Asuka said in disbelief towards the floating image of Shinji's father. The face smiled mischievously back at her.
"Would you like an example? Shinji, imagine a small animal, like a cat on the floor in front of you."
With an exasperated expression directed towards Asuka, Shinji began to look at the floor, imagining a jet-black cat. Within seconds, a physical cat appeared before them, looking up at them, slightly confused as to why it was there.
"You have got to be joking...!" Asuka slowly breathed as she watched the cat walk towards her, and physically rub its head on her leg. "How...!? I can feel it!"
"It's a confirmed success!" An incredibly overexcited sounding Yui Ikari shrieked from the communications channel. "Stability at eighty-seven percent, no problems with the children's physical composition. Phase two, go!" She yelled the final words at Gendo, who clapped his hands with excitement.
"Next, Asuka, we need you to imagine an environment. Anything will do, but try not to overcomplicate it. Somewhere you would be familiar with would be ideal." Her look of shock widened as Asuka looked back at Shinji, the black cat now in her arms as it purred contentedly.
She closed her eyes, and a few seconds later, the classroom that they had been studying in only hours beforehand materialized around them. The detail was immaculate, and apart from the lack of other students, everything was a perfect replication of the room at their school.
"Phase Two, success! Anomalies holding steady at five percent, possibly due to hosts imagination processes. Phase three!" Yui was pounding the keyboard so fast, she was beginning to worry about her fingers breaking from the pressure.
"This time, Shinji, we need you to imagine a location from a long time ago, something you won't remember perfectly." His father directed him, and Shinji nodded, beginning to concentrate on a forest that his family had once taken him to when he was six-years old.
Slowly this time, the forest in his mind began to appear around him. But in certain areas, there were static patches.
"Success! Anomalies at sixty percent, host's health remains stable!"
"I remember this forest." His father looked around the room through his window. Yui turned to him and pointed at the entrance to the room.
"Phase four, get in there!" Gendo nodded and hurried to the door, entering and standing next to the two utterly confused children. Closing his eyes, he focused on the same memory that Shinji had summoned.The static patches around them from Shinji's memories began to fuzz and stabilize into the remaining sections of forest that had been missing before. Before long, the complete forest surrounding the three open-mouthed people.
"Memory Merge, success!" Yui was beside herself as she came close to a mental breakdown from excitement. "Phase four is a success!" Gendo nodded, grinning from ear-to-ear, before turning around and looking at the electrified Shinji and Asuka. Pointing towards the cat, his grin seemed to grow even wider.
"Take it outside of the room."
For everything that had happened so far, the next thing that would await them had seemed to shock them a hundred times more. But when Asuka nervously opened the door to the unbelievable room, and stepped outside holding the imagined cat, which didn't disappear as she exited and shut the door behind her, the realization of the experiments that had happened today would change everything as they knew it suddenly began to dawn on them.
They had created life, from the imagination of a teenage boy, that persisted and survived from outside its virtual incubator. The cat meowed happily at Asuka, who's eyes were as wide as dinner plates. As of right now, Asuka Langley Soryu and the Ikari family were essentially gods of creation.
They were gods.