Displaced Commanders . . .

Yui Akari

"Akari Yui-san?" the oddly dressed American man floating in the tank calls out in Japanese, looking for all the world like he's resigned to the situation he'd been thrust into here.

He thinks this is some kind of joke?! Well, maybe it is but I’m not laughing!

Whether or not this is true at the moment does not concern me. What DOES concern me is that this stranger has basically called me OUT!

“I go by the name Rei Ayanami,” I snap back at him in English, more than a bit shrewishly. “Do not EVER call me by that other name again.”

Pardon, I find myself . . . disturbed and shaken. This room just rubbed my face in some facts I’d wish . . . to forget about myself.

Cannot go by my old name. By need I took up the old Rei’s identity because that old identity was declared dead years ago. Trying to pick up where I’d left off in THAT identity would prove . . . too hard to explain for various reasons. As for what and who I look like . . .It cannot be helped who I look like. I never expected to come back from that strange and terrible place I'd found myself within Unit 01. Did what I could to come close though to the old . . . me. Rei and all her clones have more than a passing resemblance to my old form (go figure . . .she’s a clone of ME), but I’d gone out as soon as feasible to get hair dye and color contacts.

I find even today looking like that young girl turned Angel (her blue hair and red eyes) . . .hard to take.

Hrmph, A LOT of variables I had not even DREAMED of occurring had befallen me and . . . my damned precious scenario. Looking like my own clone being the least of them!! I'd done it for all the right reason. There had been NO other choices and I'd wanted a bright future for my son and the rest of humanity. We had reached an evolutionary dead end and because of that it meant we were doomed to fade. Unless radical steps were taken. That said the only option left to me to ensure that was the path of Instrumentality, the combining of . . .

. . .

But you already know of this by now, I am sure. Know the reasons. The good and SOLID reasons why I had done what I had done.

Just . . . I had failed to take into account some things.

The man I had love, Gendo Akari, I had never dreamed would have abandoned our son. He became obsessed with being with me again so threw himself fully and blindly into his work.

To be with me again for one last time, for only a moment before Instrumentality took us all.

. . .

But he abandoned our son, Shinji, and kept DRIVING him away until the boy finally gave up and just ended up hating his father, realizing reconciliation would never be. And I cannot forgive the man for the hell he'd put Shinji through.

Let us not talk about the embarrassment I sometimes still have of what my time as Unit 01 meant when Shinji climbed aboard into it: Freudian Oedipus Complex. He had fought more than a few times, Shinji, being separated from me by his father.

And then there is Rei and the hell she'd gone through . . . the blame for that I fear lays at my feet as well as my ex-husband. He raised her to be as he had so she would remain a obedient tool, but I'd provided the means for making her in the first place. That and . . . actually hashed out the plan on creating the clone. To use as a tool and how and why she should be treated as a tool. After all, I had reasoned, a clone could never become a person . . . a real one. Why waste the effort in raising one normally as a normal human child, it would be a wasted effort and possibly given the tool wrong ideas. Make her unmanaged.

Now I wear her form. Yes, it is very similar to my old human body but until I couldn’t bear to take it any more I kept awaking each morning and seeing the face of the young girl named Rei. Hair dye and color contacts lessen the feelings of guilt, make me feel more like my old self, but still it is only so far I can go.

The alabaster skin cannot ever be changed. It doesn’t burn in the sunlight like what an albino’s skin would but it never tans. That is one reminder that I’ll never be able to hide from myself.

I was so wrong. It was not supposed to be possible, I'd thought. She was a clone and that meant . . . I thought of her more of a thing. A tool to use in order to help bring my bright future for my son about.

. . .

Pardon the angst. Just that it . . all hit me again, finding myself suddenly popping back HERE in this mirror version of my home, as it were. It’s too different from the old NERV HQ, but similar enough to be able to get around. It has to be a mirror version of NERV HQ because even nowadays MY NERV is too important to be left standing, abandoned. By logic, since we’d found ourselves near a world TOO remarkably like the Earth we all had been whisked away from (the signs of Second Impact were just Screaming at us), somehow we knew that THIS new place (which had appeared between the plotted course between the star system we’d orgiinally opted to explore and our new homeworld, Terra, the gods (or what passes for them) were playing with us again.

Fred Takahashi had been in the habit of saying that from time to time. I do believe I now have a deeper understanding of what those bitter words mean.

Trust me, we’d been VERY thorough in our scans before all Hell had broken loose. This is a world very much like the one that MY Tokyo 3 had been torn away from. How I had gotten down here is something I’m STILL trying to figure out. I’d been stumbling about (getting LOST in what I could call the mirror of my home away from home). The passcode I’d used to override the doorway hadn’t lead to were I’d expected.

I hadn’t expected to run into the chamber where the Rei clones were kept. Had NOT expected them to somehow be . . . still alive, for some reason.

Brings back a lot of memories, shall we say. I’d thought seen all those dead Rei clones back HOME had been bad enough. Wrong, these living husks are worse. Much worse.

Sigh, and here I thought I’d finally gotten somehow over it.

. . .

I wonder. Are these Rei clones floating mindlessly around in the tank with these strange men made with deliberately from genetic materials left by THIS world’s version of me. Was she as inadverantly as draconian and uncaring as I had been? Or are these clones somehow made from salvaged genetic material from what was left of my . . .er . . .her body after being drawn into Unit 01? I never dreamed that she'd become . . . human.

What kind of person is my double. What kind of person is THIS world’s Rei?

Hell, just how in the HELL did this solar system just pop up right out in front of my starship?

. . .

Starships and FTL . . . not only did the people who somehow managed to null and void the possibility of Third Impact and Instrumentality (somehow I know that these “Champions” were somehow connected to it), they’d opened up an option I’d never dreamed possible. And though I admit I always lived by the motto "Everything happens as it must" I never thought of THIS having been able to happen.

A lone high tech city being, through combining science and magic work arounds, a space worthy craft able to reach the stars: the Dawntreader. Well, I’d played part in things. Did my part to bring a bright future for all. Even managed through work and effort to somehow get command (the Commander . . . heh) of this ship for her maiden voyage. To free the world’s races (human and others) from their crib and walk amongst the stars . . .to suddenly have THIS fall on us.

The hetch drive (the Chiana papers had proven to be the easiest to impliment, though the Alan Q papers had been the Rosetta stone to understanding all of the Papers on FTL drives) had been going crazy after another starship (which looked . . .disturbingly familiar pre-Second Impact American scifi spaceship) came into scanner range.

With that in mind, I stop short after catching a better look at the OTHER unwelcome occupant in the tank.

Sigh, it HAD been said in painful details in Chiana’s papers thats a warp drive interaction with hetch drive was a recipe for disaster!

How in the name of God were we supposed to know that we’d not only run INTO a warpdrive powered starship but the VERY same starship (or an amazingly real fascimile of the TV version) which inspired (apparently) the warp drive as shown in the B’Elanna Papers?!

Turning, I see that the doorway hasn’t closed after I’d opened with my passcode. Strange. Strange that it should not have closed and strange that my code should work in THIS place, mirror or not.

Wouldn’t they have canceled it after my version had died or . . . whatever she’d done?

Did this world’s Yui die? Can’t see it that way, if these clones are here. Hm, maybe the version of my treacherous husband kept them for himself, as a keepsake of sorts?

“Hey! Someone’s overridden the doors!” someone shouts from down the hallway which I’d found myself in.

SHIT! It looks as if this abandoned place is no longer so abandoned, for whatever reasons.

Quickly, I punch the door close button and lock it as I should have before being . . . sidetracked (Oh for GOD sake’s Yui! You’re commanding OFFICER, get a grip!!). That might slow them down for a bit but . . .not long enough unless I work quickly here.

“Doctor McCoy,” I say quickly in passable English so he can understand (his universal translator seems to have been knocked offline . . . maybe the LCL?), pulling out the communication device that thus far had proven useless to me. The Dawntreader might be unable to answer right now, but I DO hope the com unit can be used to raise the Enterprise. “I need your help and NOW. The Enterprise’s transporters can get us OUT of here and away from those here who’ll shoot us for tresspassing. Speak with them!”

Speak with them so I can get up there instead of stumbling about in this dark place, looking for some means down HERE to contact my silent ship and crew up above! Get me up THERE so I can find out what's going on with my ship, please!!

1. “Doctor, do no harm!” I hiss, seeing him hesitate.

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