I wrote this last year, but have been to busy with college to mess with it much, I had some more free time on my hands this past weekend, and was cleaning out some files when i happened upon it.
I checked for spelling errors and decided I'd work on it after all.
This is the first draft from the first sub chapter.
Since the chapters are really long, I have them devided into sub chapters.
Hope you like it.
Rise of the Lillin
by
The Olin
Chapter 1: Return to the New
When you blink do you only find,
the misery between the lines?
-AFI
The countryside of Japan had undergone a extensive tansformation since the polar ice caps had
begun to shift, but remained nonetheless beautiful as summer gave way to fall.
Already the flora had taken on a unatural shade of gold and orange that would remain that way
untill the winter snow stole the foliage away.
Shinji’s aunt had told him a long time ago that before the floods, the season of fall had once
lasted a proper three months in Japan and the leaves had been a far more handsome shade of
crimson. She had also told him of how long and cold the winters had been. Shinji, who had been
born almost a decade after the polar shift still had always had trouble imagining the mountains
of Japan covered in powdery drifts of snow.
Most of the things his aunt had told him about the world that had exisited before the global
upheaval that had taken place at the beginning of the twenty first century seemed nebulous to
him.
When a person tells you the air you have breathed all your life once tasted not of the ever present
sea salt or purifying chemicals that where fed through the streets from the massive vents in the
ground, or that the plants you learned about in school and grew in your neighbor’s garden where
really nothing but colorful mutations of the original plant, you find you have either very little
interest in what this person is telling you or you think they’ve taken leave of their senses.
The past can not be touched or smelt, and when you lived with someone like Shinji Ikari’s aunt,
who would wake in the morning and stare at the sunken buildings that stuck up from their
crumblings foundations in the ocean not with familliarity but in disgust, their company became
very tiring.
Shinji’s aunt blamed every misfortune in the world on the Impact and when Shinji pointed out
how it had actually rejuvinated the Earth’s eco system rather then destroying it and done in just a
couple of decades what a millenium of war and politcal squables could not, peace bewtween the
free nations, his aunt would roll her eyes and say “don’t by into the press Shinji, your uncle
always did and it killed him.”
Of course, the Impact had been a planetary disastor that had caused the polar shift and consequnt
flooding that had resulted in the death of two thirds of the human race.
There was no way around that but Shinji was content to live in the present. And if half the things
his history teachers had taught him was true, things had been looking up for Japan and the
human race in general.
So his aunt could just stop her ranting about the Impact as if it marked the beggining of the end
of the world and be content with the fruits of the new age.
It was a brave new world, the global economy was back up, Japan was prospering, and most of
the new plants beat his aunt’s old set by a hell of a long shot. He couldn’t understand why she
was so discontent.
Although discontent wasn’t the right word for it really. Furious seemed more like it.
That was it. It sometimes seemed to Shinji that his Aunt was furious that humanity had had the
gawl to survive the impact in the first place.
That they should have just raised a white flag and let the floods wipe them out. How dare they
cope? How could they rebuild? Didn’t the fools see? Humanity’s number was up! throw in the
towel you ninnes!
Although she had never said these things aloud, her disdain for the new world became more and
more prevelent (or at least apparent) as he got older.
It was upsetting, but what of that? Adults were a very upsetting bunch. Shinji couldn’t really
understand how they got along.
He sighed loudly and stared back out the window. The countryside was beutiful, but it was so
damn boring after the first two hours. Although Shinji suspected that when you spent two hours
on a bus, the mythical isle of Avalon would start to look boring.
Shinji reached for his duffel bag and discovered his arm had fallen asleep.
Inside the old black duffel were the whole of his meager possesions. A cd player, four of the five
T-shirts he owned, (he was wearing the fifth) assorted pairs of sock and underwear, some jeans,
his school books, a battered arist’s pad, a Sony portable game system, and a wrinkled manila
envelope. This he pulled out and emptied it’s contents into his lap.
He quickly sifted through the six or seven sheets of computer paper with important looking
messages typed across them, and sat aside a red jacket that was still wrapped in plastic.
Come on Come on, where is it? Shinji was suddenly afraid he had made this whole trip for
nothing.
He stacked the envelope and it’s contents on the empty seat next to him before pulling the duffel
onto his lap and giving it a second more thorough search.
This time he found what he was looking for. A photgraph with a message scrawled along the
back.
The photo depicted a woman who was in reality, well near the end of her thirties but looked not
a day over twenty seven. The woman’s hair was cut almost as short as her sons’ and was dyed a
perfect shade of fir tree green.
She wore a white lab coat over a plain pink shirt and a very fetching black mini. Her arms where
folded over her breasts and her face was glowing with a smirk of defiant triumph.
Although if one where to lean over Shinji’s shoulder and give his postcard a cursory glance, they
would not have even noticed the woman. They would have been far to busy examining the iron
behemoth in back of her.
The postcard was dominated by a monolithic pair of shoulders, accompanied by a massive trunk
that bore a passing resemblance to the human neck. A equally immense head sat atop it.
As near as Shinji could tell, it was some kind of new MWC* built for battlefield engagemnt
rather then weapon retrival. It was a millitaristic green but the camoflouge was interrputed in
several places by bright orange trimmings that were so indescreet, Shinji guessed stealth
missions were not one of this particular unit’s qualifications.
There was something that made this unit stand out though, the head. While most MWCs were
equipped either with steel domes that resembelled jet fighter cockpits, the synthetic before him
had a proper neck, and perfectly porportioned head set upon it. There was a single red optical
sensor that served as it’s face, and it’s head was shaped like a commando’s helmet.
Further observation revealed a similiar humanism detailing covered the entire unit’s design.
While JSDF* carriers had two long struts that served as legs, and a trio of sythetic limbs that
ended in rude clamps designed exclusivlly for retriving tanks or missles, the green robot in the
picture had a pair of broad but very organic shoulders, with two matching arms that ended in a
perfectly formed human hand, granted one large enough to hold the bus he was riding in it’s
palm, but it had a thumb and four multi jointed fingers, and the design was so smooth and
streamlined one could imagine not a mass of wires and circut boards beneath it’s plating but a
immense, pink human hand.
This did not surprise Shinji, who could still remember vaugely the mechanical designs his
mother had framed and hung in there old house in Kyoto, pencil sketches that depicted common
street lifters with perfectly human legs, and a cockpit situated between two enormous but
elegently crafted iron breasts, or space stations shaped like a human embryo, Shinji could
remember one that his mother had loved. It had been done by a famous science fiction artist and
looked like a design plan for a refrigerator, only when one opened the door, by themselves or by
remote, a four foot tall sythetic, that resembled a highly intelegent human baby, that was stored
in the bottom shelf popped out and prepared your dinner. In the picture the robot baby’s eyes
where colored a deep shade of red and seemed to stare straight through whoever happened by the
painting.
Shinji could still remember many a nightmare that painting had given him.
The Sythetic carrier in the photo carried the same pointlessly human aesthetic that marked all his
mother’s private works, be they a new car design or a human shaped laptop computer.
Author’s Note: MWC stands for Mobile Weapons Carrier and is a common piece of twenty first century millitary
tehcnology. Essatially a Weapons platform equipped with two legs and multi purpose forelimbs, a MWC carries
weapons and personell to and from specidifec points. The most popular model is Japan’s Jet Alone.
JSDF stands for Japanese Self Defense force
The bus hit a pothole, yanking Shinji out of his nostalgic reverie.
He went back to looking outside for a few mintues and was rewarded with a big green traffic
sign that read:
NEW CITY 20KM
Authorized Personnel only!
Have proper I.D. ready.
This brought Shinji back to the small stack of papers that had come with his long lost mother’s
dubious postcard. Underneath the second sheet of offical drivel was a plastic Id. card that
proclaimed it’s owner, Shinji Ikari, a officaly authorized visitor of New City.
This he shoved into his back pocket before going back to examing the photo. He turned it over to
read yet again the cryptic message that had gotten him on the stupid bus in the first place.
Scrawled across back in neat handwriting was a message:
Happy Birthday Son! I’ve enclosed a one way plane and bus
ticket to New City, why don’t you come down and see what you’re
mother has been up to?
All my love, Mom
P.S. don’t lose the visitor’s card
Shinji had thought it was some kind of joke, and one that was in overwhelmingly bad taste at
that, until he had shown the postcard and tickets to his aunt.
“This is amazing Shinji! I knew this day was coming, You’re mother is ready to take you back!”
His aunt had then set to work, or rather set him to work, packing.
It was a brief chore, Shinji had never owned much, and his aunt belived that earthly possessions
did nothing but tie down the human soul.
After packing, they had set down to their usual supper and his aunt had asked him wether or not
he was excited. “I guess...yeah” had been his response and Shinji knew even before the words
had left his mouth, they had been ill advised.
His Aunt had sniffed (in her usual oh my goodness, there he goes again manner) and told him he
sure didn’t sound like it.
“Well, I don’t really know my mother and-”
She had interrupted him “Don’t be stupid Shinji, she’s a lovely person and you’ll love her.”
The statement left little in the way for argument, but Shinji had to disagree.
“You don’t know if you can love a person if you’ve never known them.”
“What’s that mean?” His Aunt had had her eyes fixed on him at this point and Shinji decided to
keep his own eyes locked on his sock covered feet.
“Just that, I might not like it there and-”
Again she interuppted. “Nonsense. You’ll like it in New city, why, it’s built right over the ocean,
and they have much nicer schools, and you’ll be able to live in a real house again Shinji, no more
dirty little apartments for you.”
The apartment he shared with his aunt was spotless and they both knew it, but when Akio Ikari
was trying to make a point, reality rarely played any but the vaguest part in it.
“Yes...ma’am.”
Aunt Akio had gone on to explain that she would take care of the transfer to his new school, and
he could leave as soon as the school week was over.
Supper had passed in the usual silence, and it was only after his aunt had excused herself with
the usual “Wash the dishes before you go to bed Shinji” that he had blurted out “C-can I come
back if I don’t like it there Akio-sama?”
She had paused and gave Shinji a brief look. Shinji wasn’t sure what the look had ment at first,
but he understood now that his Aunt had been on the verge of losing her usually well kept
temper. Instead she had smiled and said “But Shinji, dear, why would you want to?”
As Shinji’s new residence grew ever closer, he decided that that had been a no.
Well? Questions? Comments?
Does it Suck? Am I wasting my time?
Or Should I go ahead and finish what I started?