...so then sensei tells her to sit down next to Ikari. And everyone's watching her. She starts giggling, and sits down by Ikari, and he says "Hi, Tempis-san," on the first try. And she's still giggling. But she says, "Hello, Ikari- kun," real polite-like. Shinji's bright red by now. I thought he was going to choke. Then he says--get this--he says, "Would you like me to show you around the school?" Can you believe that? What a line!

Touji laughed. "I don't believe you, Kensuke. Ikari doesn't have the love spuds to hit on a girl."

You should've seen the Demon's face! Thank God I got her in the same shot as the new girl. She looked like she was going to explode. Anyway, so the new girl hasn't got her giggles done with yet, but she nods. Then Ikari says, "Really?" like he didn't believe she would.

"OK, that sounds more like him."

Yeah. So then Tempis starts nodding her head like crazy, FINALLY gets her giggles under control. Shinji asks her again, "Would you like me to show you around?" She nods.

"Uh-huh..."

Yamamoto comes up to her. And he's like half a head taller than Ikari and has fashion sense. He plops his hand down on Tempis' shoulder and says, "Forget him, baby. I'll show you around." She starts LAUGHING, and really loudly. Ikari is frozen. Yamamoto looks like his balls have dropped right off his body...

"Oh, that's rich. That's great."

...Asuka is now so red she's purple. I've just got her reaction and am focusing on Tempis when she starts laughing so hard she falls out of her chair onto the floor.

Touji snickered.

Here's the punch line. Sensei missed the whole thing.

Touji roared with laughter. "Hell, it looks like I picked the wrong week to join NERV. I missed out on all the fun."

Hey, don't worry. You have your own hobbies. I'm sure inchou- chan will be by to 'drop off the printouts' for you later on, right?

"Aaah, I'm never going to hear the end of this, am I?"

Nope. Not if I can help it. So I'll e-mail you that scene from this morning--whoops, got to go. PE's almost over. Take it easy, all right?

"All righty. Bye."

Touji pressed the "end" button on the cel phone and set it on the side table. He sighed and nestled back into the pillows behind him. He was beginning to deal with the psychological trauma of his injuries, but only as far as his own handicapped state. The more time that went by, the more angles he saw to what had happened to him.

What would happen when he left the hospital? His sister was still unable to leave her room, but the doctors were certain Touji be released someday. The disabled were often hidden away from society, is that what would become of him? Nobody in his family had time to take care of him--would his father hire a nurse to keep him healthy? Could his friends accept him once again, even though he couldn't play games with them and go wherever they did?

What about Hikari? She'd told him some things over the last two days that were wonderful to hear, but were they her honest feelings? What if she was just trying to humor him to help him get better? Touji didn't think she was, but there were still nagging doubts. And there was a big, big difference between promises and fulfillment, he knew that as well as anyone.

Lastly, there was Shinji. Hikari had told Touji that his friend hadn't made an appearance at school since the battle with the Angel. This had upset the young man more than he wanted to tell her. He knew Shinji pretty well, intuitively, and he felt like his friend would have been horrified to discover what all had happened. But Shinji was back in school, and upbeat enough to be flirting with the new girl in the class. Something didn't quite fit together, but Touji dismissed that thought. He only hoped that Ikari would stop by for a visit soon.

Touji's musings were cut short as a nurse walked in with a package. "Mr. Suzuhara? This arrived for you a few minutes ago. I think it's a video."

"Great, thanks for bringing it. Does it say who it's from?"

"No...do you think I should take it to security?"

"Eh, don't bother. Hand me my laptop, will you?"

The nurse left the room as Touji opened the brown paper wrapper. Sure enough, it was a video disk in a blank jewel case. "Heavenly Hooters" was written on the disk in permanent marker.

Touji smirked. Oh, boy, he thought, it's from Kensuke.

He loaded the disk in and made himself comfortable. The video began. The camera panned slowly up the dark skin of a woman wearing silks and exotic furs. "Hello, sexy boy," she cooed over the background music.

Touji squirmed with excitement.

"Looks like you've been in some trouble lately," she went on in her breathy voice. She rolled over, letting her platinum hair rain down across her shoulders. The camera gave a beautiful view straight down her front. "Workin' hard to save all the innocent girls of the world. Such an upstanding young man you are."

"Gggllll..." said Touji through his own saliva.

"I would love it," the video girl purred, "if you would do one eensy- weensy-teensy favor for me...just a little somethin'...and I'll do whatever you want for you, all right?"

"Mmm...hmm..."

She smiled. "I hoped you would. Tell me, you hunk of burnin' love...would you help me find my sister?"

The question struck him as a rather unusual one. Then Touji leaped to the obvious conclusion. "AW, YEAH! I LOVE THIS KIND OF STUFF!"

"Eh?"

"COME ON, BABY, I WANT TO WATCH YOU!"

The smile had slipped off of the face of the girl on Touji's computer. She shook her head. "No, no, you don't understand. Have you seen Skuld anywhere?"

"I don't care WHAT you call it, as long as I get to watch."

"For Heaven's sake, I'm not getting through to you. Hang on a sec..."

The screen of Touji's computer went all white; and then the woman from the video emerged, nose first, from the flat screen's surface. In a matter of two seconds her upper half was dangling out of the computer and against the very elated Suzuhara Touji.

"Now, then, tell me nice and clearly--have you seen a mysterious young woman anywhere around here in the last two days?"

"...."

"Oh, sorry, is that your leg?"

"I don't have a leg anymore, that's my dick. You really are real, aren't you?"

Urd had no sooner removed her hand from the member in question when Touji grabbed her left breast with his one remaining hand. "THEY'RE REAL! HOLY COW, KENSUKE, HOW'D YOU DO IT?"

"Pervert!" snapped Urd, and smashed him over the head with her fist. Touji was out like a light. Urd extracted the rest of herself from the computer, stretched, and glanced around the room. "A hospital, eh? Well, I could press the nurse call button and get some information, but the odds are that he'll wake up first."

At the same time that her older sister was discovering the nuances of life on this plane of existence, Skuld was savoring them. She was lying on top of a slope of rich green grass that smelled like life itself. Through the leaves of a ginkgo tree she could see wind blowing past in infrared. On one side of her was a little red ant, busily searching for a source of sucrose on the ground. On the other was her new friend.

Ikari Shinji handed Skuld one bento box from out of his book bag and took the other for himself. "So far, so good...the giggles were a nice touch."

"Oh, that was unintentional, Shinji," she snickered. "I just get the giggles sometimes."

"Giggles, and hammering people." Skuld glanced at him to see if he was teasing her, but it wasn't malicious. He was smiling as he munched on a slim slice of pickle. "After lunch we have math. Do you want to study together after school? I'm not good at math at all, and Asuka...doesn't give me good help."

"I'd love to help you, Shinji," Skuld said dreamily.

He thought that the tone of voice was for his ears alone, and he blushed. When he looked at Skuld, though, he saw that she was staring off into the sky with her eyelids half-closed. Shinji looked up. High above their heads clouds blew by, carried on the heaven's silent winds.

"What a beautiful day," he said. "Skuld, do you have lunch breaks in heaven?"

She shook her head. "No need for lunch. Things simply are in Heaven. You are working, or you are not."

"That sounds like a very simple existence."

"It's 'cause I'm explaining it simply. It becomes complicated if you think about it, just like everything else." She yawned, then cut it off and pointed earnestly. "Shinji, Shinji, look at that cloud up there."

Shinji looked up and leaned backwards, allowing the hill to catch him. "You mean that big one up there?"

"Yeah! Doesn't it look like a carp?"

"Yes..."

The word drifted away, and then Shinji snapped up to a leaning position. "Skuld, was that supposed to be a joke?"

"Hm?" She rolled her head over to look at him. "What do you mean, Shinji?"

He had spoken with apprehension in his voice, but it winnowed away as he chuckled. There was a little red ant on Skuld's face, crawling from her nose across her cheek like an impetuous freckle. "Ah, I just thought you were making a play on words. You know...'koi' for fish, and 'koi' for love."

Skuld fell silent. Her eyes looked away from Shinji to some point in space; then she blinked; and then she returned her gaze to him with a smile. "I guess you could make a joke like that."

"Mm-hm." Shinji folded up his empty bento box. "So were you trying to make a joke, or was that just an accident?"

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Skuld said coyly.

"Yes, I would," he replied; not in his usual tone of voice, not in the way he would have spoken only the day before. He said it in a mocking tone of voice, in fact, one very similar to how Skuld had spoken. Maybe, just maybe, he was hoping to goad her a little further.

But his efforts were unrewarded, at least in that way. Skuld put her hands behind her head and giggled at the boy who was so desperate for her attention. So Shinji followed her example. He lay down next to her and joined her in reverie. In less that two minutes' time, he felt happy. Sincerely happy, a kind of joy that made him look forward to what the rest of the day had in store for him and his friend. He free from all his concerns in the world.

Freedom, however, is a state of mind and little more. Two of his most important concerns in the world were both watching him intently from almost exactly 50 meters away, though each at different relative angles and points in space. Inside the school building, Sohryu Asuka Langley was staring at the couple from out of a second-story window. She had done a complete chromatoemotional lap, going red with anger, purple with rage, blue with depression, green with envy, lemon yellow with sour bitterness, and was wrapping up an orange canker with the prospect of going into another round at any instant.

Shinji was going after A Girl. Oh, it didn't matter that it was someone other than herself; she would have felt no different if Shinji had smiled at her all through three periods of school, cheered her in the volleyball game and then invited her outside to enjoy lunch in the bright sunshine together. She would have laughed at him. Any normal girl would have.

But The Girl was different. This Girl was from some male-deprived Third World country in Europe that regarded puny, perverse and pathetic as positive personality points! Of course, it wasn't as though The Girl was making the slightest effort to fit in. She'd skirted a number of her classmate's questions, like "Where are you from?" and "What's your family like?" Not giving an inch, That Girl. How on Earth would The Girl fit in at all if she didn't make friends?

How on Earth would The Girl be happy?

Asuka seethed like the Sea of Japan held water. Shinji and The Girl were never going to last. Sooner or later, they'd realize how mismatched they were, and then they'd be sorry for NOT LISTENING TO ASUKA LANGLEY WHEN THEY HAD THE CHANCE!!!

Then Asuka made the mistake of listening to one of her classmates, one Kurata Sana, who observed, "Asuka-chan...isn't that your lunch that the new girl's eating?"

Asuka snapped the desk she was sitting on top of in two with her bare hands and began getting angry in the microwave band.

Ignorant of her fellow pilot in their classroom, Ayanami Rei watched Ikari Shinji from a spot on the same hillside. Hidden behind a tree, she monitored Shinji with her usual calm focus as she placed a phone call to the Geofront. On the other end of the line, Ikari Gendou answered silently.

"Ikari-kun's behavior is deviating," Rei said. Her voice was strained, but only the speaker and the listener were able to tell the difference.

How so?

"He has been speaking with the new transfer student."

There was silence, and then Ikari asked, What has he been talking to her about?

Rei struggled to summarize the conversations she had overheard. Her mind, hyperacute from years of isolation and training with NERV, was not the source of her problems. Instead, it was that Ikari-kun had been rather redundant and glib during them all, and Tempis-san had said almost nothing.

"I think," Rei concluded, "that it has been nothing of consequence. He has asked about her well-being. He has showed her around the campus. He has asked her to join him for lunch. That is all."

Lunch? exclaimed the Commander. Where?

"On the hillside to the southeast of the school. I am monitoring them presently."

Oh. I thought he had asked her out on a date. That is all very interesting, Rei.

She waited patiently for a few moments before the Commander spoke again. Continue as you were doing, Rei.

"Yes, sir."

And call me immediately if either he or she use the "S" word.

"Understood."

In his office in the Geofront, Commander Ikari Gendou replaced the telephone on the receiver and resumed The Gendou Position (tm). His mind, usually like a series of tightly networked supercomputers, was at present more like a single Commodore 64 on crack cocaine. He was upset. Not that anyone but a qualified gastrointestinal specialist could have known. But he was very worried about his son.

Shinji was not supposed to have any focused desires. The Commander had carefully planned the people in Shinji's life: Rei, Asuka, Misato, all had been groomed to have the most neurotic personalities possible to ensure that Shinji would grow to become a self-loathing, Oedipal outcast of society with the internal moral fiber of a Twinkie. All this, so that when the time came, he would grope blindly for the approval, love and protection of a mother figure...and so the world would someday tilt upon its axis, and Ikari Gendou's goals would be realized.

Gendou twitched a single pinkie knuckle. What kind of a girl would go for my son? he thought. Only a fellow outcast. Only someone completely maladjusted to society's norms. Which raises the question of how they met. Never mind. The central issue is that Shinji's state of mind is threatened. He must not stray from his predicted course. This new girl is a threat...but perhaps it would be better to accommodate her than to eliminate her directly. Maybe I could give the boy an encouraging talk about the joys of celibacy...

It was a really, really rotten time for Ritsuko to walk into his office and say, "Commander, Lieutenant Ibuki and I have something exciting we'd like to show off to you."