So I went and rewatched the Evangelion: Another Impact animated short from Anno's Anime Expo, and (with some pointers from some YouTube comments) I noticed some rather...significant details and potential implications of the event.
So, the scene depicts an Eva unit in its hangar, suddenly going berserk, being forcibly ejected and NERV VTOLs trying- and failing- to destroy it. It then thinks it hears something, charges through a building, and seemingly picks up Rei (only her eye is seen) before emitting an absolutely spine-tingling roar of hate, pain and misery.
Now, this seems like it was just done for Rule of Cool. However, there is one very important detail that signifies (at least to me) that there is something more to this.
When the camera zooms out as it roars (shudder) if you look closely, you can actually see the crater it is standing in fill up with red fluid, like the surrounding sea.
Figure 1: Eva roaring in crater.
Figure 2: Same crater (circled) now filled with red liquid.
Now, I propose that this Eva is in fact Unit 04 (albeit with some artistic liberties taken for the design) and that the event we see is the destruction of NERV's Nevada branch. I have a few pieces of evidence:
1: Unit 04 has never appeared in Rebuild canon proper (outside of that one Pachinko game, I don't think it's appeared in animated form at all) so we don't know what it actually looks like.
2: As seen above, we see that it is clearly doing something awful and self destructive (seemingly tanging itself) which would line up with the events depicted in 2.0 in which Nevada disappeared in an Impact-like explosion, albeit only seen from space. And let's be honest, an event in which a (seemingly Super Solenoid Engine equipped) Evangelion not merely explodes, but melts into red goo can only be very bad news.
3: Designwise, it somewhat resembles its "twin" Unit 03 in some ways, specifically the head design.
Now the only downfalls of this theory are that the landscape doesn't look much like Nevada (but then, [color=#BFBF00]>Impact geography[/color]) and that the engineers appear to be speaking Japanese, though that could be ignored as a simple matter of actor availability.
But that's not the only interesting part. Now as we see, it scoops up something which is heavily implied to be Rei (who else has blood-red eyes?). However, this wouldn't make sense considering that Rei is all the way in Japan, and unless she's either doing some teleportation shenanigans or NERV Nevada has a Rei cloning plant too, she has no business being in Nevada. Plus, we see the Eva clench its hand in a way that would crush poor Rei into pulp had she literally been in its hand.
Which leads me to part two of this post- the Rei we see (albeit briefly) in this short is not a literal physical presence of Rei. Rather, it is a transition guide (ala EoE) that is there to bring the Eva's soul over to the other side at the end of its short, hideous life.
This seems to imply 3 very important things about the metaphysics at play in Rebuild.
1: Quantum Rei is still very much in effect here.
2: Transition guides apply to Evas too.
3: (And this is the biggie) The Evas still have souls in Rebuild.
Anything else I've missed, feel free to mention.
