'The Chronicles of Evania'
Chapter 1: An Early Start

(o)

This story is about something that happened long ago when your grandfather was a child. Of course, this will mean little to you if you should happen to read this a century from now, so be secure in the knowledge that practically every event contained herein takes place in the space of three seconds of our time.

To provide you with some point of reference, let us say that our story begins at a time when Harry Potter was an infant received into the grudging arms of his Aunt and
Uncle, when Lyra Belacqua was still in her infancy at Jordan College, running through the streets of Oxford and throwing handfuls of mud at all those who dared
oppose her. Terry Pratchett's soul was unreleased at this point in time from the prison that his publishers had used to ensnared it, and Discworld books continued to line
shelves, forever unsought and indifferent to one another.

Should you fail to draw any connotations from these monuments to their respective timeframe, let us be absolute in the knowledge that it was a time before America ruled
the world, quite some time before the Dodo was resurrected from extinction to serve as the new household pet, and that should you have any doubt at all in this setting, Denim was still in fashion. It was in these days that there lived in London a girl by the name of Asuka Langley Sohryu.

To say up that up until this point she was a rather average girl wouldn't be strictly true, for the nature of her prolonged stay with relatives too-far removed was a point of
contention amongst those around her that considered themselves her friends, and the bringing up of the matter in conversation had only resulted in the immediate
excommunication of the appropriate questioner until such a point that they could win themselves back into her favour.

She lived in a tall Victorian-era house that had somehow survived the German bombing of its neighbours during the war, a fact that was at one stage pointed out to
the young girl in consideration of her nationality – an observation that cost the boy in question several days of his school time whilst he recuperated from a broken arm.

Gentle, Asuka was not.

It just so happened that on an unusually sunny day for the English climate, she was sitting in her back garden waiting for the sun in her favourite yellow summer dress
(seldom worn, again thanks to the climate) reading Alice in Wonderland for the third time. What made this day doubly unusual was that as the Red Queen was pronouncing presumptuous judgement upon her courtiers for the theft of her prized tarts, the sounds of sobbing from the garden adjoining hers reached Asuka's ears, causing her to hastily prop the book open against her wooden sunlounger as she went to investigate the noise.

It was, Asuka decided upon reflection, hardly worth her investigating, for the source of the sobbing was soon found to be a common-looking boy crouched at the bottom of
his own garden alongside a small and inauspicious gravestone. It had been hastily erected from the looks of it, and bearing no visible trace of any markings that might denote the identity of what presumably lay in a grave beneath it. Asuka determined that the monument clearly meant something to the boy from the sobs that wracked his fragile frame, and it was her assumption that the grave contained some beloved pet, recently deceased.

Certainly, nothing worth the fuss of crying over. In Asuka's opinion, ever allowing such an inferior being a place in your heart was simply asking for trouble, and she decided at length to denounce the boy for his stupidity.

"A pet, was it?" said Asuka, leaning over the fence and looking particularly smug, or as she thought herself, superior.

The boy turned hurriedly toward her, visibly startled, and hastily set about drying his eyes on the sleeves of a shirt that had clearly seen better days. It looked to Asuka as if the boy had been dragged backwards through a bush, or more suitably, pulled from the earthen grave. The latter thought cost her a small shudder as all-too vivid childhood memories asserted themselves, but she shrugged these images off and eyed the boy like a hyena ready to tear the last piece of meat from a ragged carcass.

"Not- not exactly," replied the boy in plaintive tones, once his sobs has subsided somewhat.

"What then, a plant?" The boy shook his head slowly.

"Then why the hell are you so hung up about it?" demanded Asuka, exasperated at being found wrong twice in a row. Failure was not to be tolerated.

"It's my mother," said the boy in a voice barely above a whisper. Asuka paled visibly.

"Your- your mother? Why the hell is she buried here? Are your family idiots – she should be in a cemetery or something!"

The boy looked up at her with dry eyes, and an unreadable expression on his lightly tanned face.

"Oh, she isn't buried here or anything. This is just a marker – to show that she existed at all. I don't know where her body is buried, if it even is."

"Why wouldn't it be-"

"Because my father couldn't take it and so he- so he destroys everything to do with her- everything!"

Asuka took no great amount of time in the receiving of this information, but with the knowledge came a preoccupation that was all too familiar to her. There were
similarities between herself and this boy that seemed almost too coincidental to be believed – but she could hardly accuse the boy of lying about what was undoubtedly a
horrendous event for him too, so she determined that a new approach was in order if she was to ascertain the boy's truth in the matter.

"I'm Asuka, what's your name?" said Asuka at some length, placing her hands firmly on her hips in a show of authority over the proceedings.

The boy seemed lost for words, and Asuka was beginning to wonder if perhaps he was not entirely right in the head, before he carefully picked himself up from the
earthy patch and made his way to the section of fencing alongside of which Asuka was stood. He proceeded to extend his hand (a little clumsily, Asuka thought) in the
traditional fashion of greeting and announced himself to her.

"Shinji Ikari," said Shinji.

(o)

To say that Asuka and Shinji immediately became the best of friends would be lying to a considerable extent. Rather, Asuka tolerated Shinji with a grudging respect that
placed him a little way above a number of the boys attending her school. Or rather, their school, as they were soon to learn.

In any case, neither currently had to deal with the expectations of their school or its subject tutors, for their friendship had begun little more than a week into the summer
holidays, and after a week or two Asuka was content to drag Shinji around with her to any event that interested her or source of conceivable adventure that presented itself,
and with the exclusion of that matter concerning the tombstone in Shinji's garden, their topics of conversation varied considerably; from the state of their neighbourhood
to discussion of the few books that Asuka had lent Shinji, for the relations he was staying with were too concerned with their duties at work to cater for his budding
appetite for literature.

It was around this time also that the pair encountered another of their classmates, on the seemingly innocuous task of borrowing course textbooks from the public library.
Shinji was the first to see her, for Asuka was already a row ahead picking out a number of teenage romance books concerning affairs with older, more mature
boyfriends, whilst Shinji was waylaid under those volumes that Asuka has already chosen and deigned him their carrier. It was as Shinji was walking through the science
fiction section, past Adams, Asimov and Dick, that he came across a girl aged roughly around fourteen by his estimate, as he and Asuka were.

She wore the girl's version of the school uniform that Shinji too wore outside of school, simply for lack of other clothes to wear (a fashion that Asuka had determined
to part him from, once a suitably cheap clothes shop could be located), and was striking in her appearance for two additional reasons: her eyes were red as rubies,
whilst her hair was of a blue rapidly approaching his own eye colour. Shinji, not one of the world's foremost conversationalists at the best of times, was completely dumbstruck for anything to say to her – the uniform alone could be in use by any number of other schools in the district, and it seemed to him presumptuous to start a conversation with her when she was clearly studying.

These procrastinations and many more besides at last reached their fruition after several moments of internal contemplation, by which time the girl had already moved across the aisle. Determination (or stubborness, as Asuka had classed it) being one of Shinji's few strengths in life, he was resolute in the decision to make contact. Inspiration struck him at last as the girl pulled from the rack Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a novel he himself had developed a great affinity for (it was the second of the books Asuka had leant him from her own collection) and could potentially use as a springboard for conversation.

Attempting in the space of several seconds to recall the myriad of adventures that had confounded the crew of the Nautilus, Shinji returned his gaze to the object of his sudden and practically inexplicable affections – or at least to where she had stood, for she was now nowhere to be seen. Refusing to give up at this new, sudden and unwelcome hurdle, Shinji hurried to the next row - and the next – and so forth, until he had reached the furthest and most obscure section of the library, to which seldom few venture ('Politics'), without any semblance of success in his search for the enigmatic girl. It was an odd occurrence for Shinji, and stuck in his mind for weeks afterward.

It was an event that would return to haunt him later on.

That is of course not to say that there were numerous other occurrences throughout the holidays (for what is a holiday if not a time for adventure?), but this was by far the most relevant, as you may find at a future point. An event of even greater importance, and indeed the beginning of the first true adventure, took place several weeks later.
The day itself was typical of the English climate in that it was neither pouring with rain, nor bedazzled with sunshine, but a singularly neutral kind of day – the sky was
clear but clouds loomed; it was pleasantly warm but a cold wind swept the air; ice creams were sold but it seemed somehow inappropriate to eat them. For Asuka, this
surfeit of unwelcoming outdoor conditions was a perfect opportunity to reveal to Shinji something that few people had seen before – a fact that she repeated to him in
as many words and she grasped him by the hand and dragged him through her house and up the stairs to her bedroom, which she promptly entered, shutting the door firmly behind them.

To say that Shinji was more nervous than he had been at any other point in his life would not be entirely accurate, but it certainly felt that way to him. He had been
brought up from an early age by his foster parents with the belief that a girl's bedroom was very much a forbidden zone, and the maniacal gleam radiating from Asuka's eyes did little to disconcert him as to the proposed nature of the trip.

"Okay Shinji, close your eyes and don't open them until I say so!" said Asuka playfully, taking his hands in her own and placing them firmly over his eyes.

If she was aware of Shinji's clear awkwardness at the situation, she wasn't letting on about it. It had taken several days of internal deliberation at her own behest of whether or not to show Shinji what it was she was currently uncovering. To put none too fine a point on it, it was a place that she had never before shared with a friend (or friend-esque acquaintance, as she regarded them) and certainly not her foster parents, with whom she shared little in terms of affection and who, in turn, reciprocated.

"So, what do you think?" Asuka's excited voice sounded out of the darkness beyond his trembling hands. "You can look now, idiot!"

Quivering with a mixture of something between fear and anticipation, Shinji uncovered his eyes whilst keeping them ever downward-cast, and let his gaze travel
slowly upward to where Asuka had uncovered her-

"Why is there a hole in your wall, Asuka?"

"Why is there a tent in your pants, Shinji?"

(o)

Asuka's most closely kept secret was a space of about the width of a grand piano, the height of a Victorian mantelpiece and the depth of a Britney song (less than a meter,
for those in doubt). As Shinji was soon to discover, however, this small space opened into a much larger passage that stretched some way in both directions – this was
visible only by the light of an antique oil lamp lying some way into the space, around which were spread numerous objects of varying size and description.

It was essentially an Aladdin's cave of all that Asuka deemed special to her in some way. There were piles of books, some of which Shinji noticed still retained library
prefixes, stacks of records, magazines and birthday cards, Christmas cards and postcards, all arranged into small piles. There were a few items that Shinji was
surprised to find in her keeping; a half-empty packet of cigarettes ('half-full', Asuka interjected), several empty bottles of a German beer called 'Schmucker' (of which
there were many more in a crate opposite), and a story Asuka had been writing that she refused to let Shinji see – the subject of guitar-wielding teenaged space girls
seeking ultimate power through suspiciously-shaped portals in the heads of younger teen boys was not seen to be entirely in lieu with modern literature, though Asuka was
convinced that a cult following would one day emerge.

To say that Shinji was relieved at the sight of this hidden room would be a considerable understatement, for it was at around this point that he came to realize two things; that Asuka could at times be uncompromisingly odd, and very much like him in a number of ways, and that at other times she could be (as he had suspected over the course of the time they had spend together) to put none too fine a point on it – entirely irresistible.

Asuka watched Shinji's face for any signs of movement or awareness of the hand she was belatedly waving back and forth in front of his face. When it became clear that no
response would be likely for some time, she decided that it might be as good an occasion as any to revaluate this rather bizarre individual. Somewhat precociously, and as a therapist or councillor might have done in her position, she reached the verdict that Shinji was, if nothing else, considerably unhinged. It was with this confirmation of her earlier suspicions that she decided he might indeed be perfect for her.

If ever adventure was to be found in this most dreary of platitudinous estates, she felt quite confident that Shinji could be relied upon to take the blame, the first step
into any situation she might consider dangerous, or failing both of these serve as some type of human shield.

Quite, quite perfect.

Now it just so happened that this vacant space into which Asuka had piled her most private of personal possessions did not exist as some flaw of the house's design, but
instead was merely part of a larger passage that occupied the space between the brick wall of the upstairs rooms and the sloping tile roof that lay above and slightly to the
side of them. This tunnel had no floor to speak of, for below lay only the rafters that structured the roof, and it required some skill with which to traverse these narrow
beams. It was into this tunnel that Asuka proceeded to drag Shinji, who had at last broken from his internal reflection the moment he found himself standing on a
veritable tightrope above the ceiling of the room below. Asuka, who had already crossed the rafter and was about to proceed onto the next one, beckoned somewhat
exasperatedly to him.

"Hang on for just a minute, Asuka. Are you sure you know where you're going?"

"You mean 'where are we going', slowpoke," Asuka countered, her excitement and anticipation all too visible for Shinji, who had never been the most accomplished
gymnast.

"We're going exploring!" came the cheerful response.

(o)

To Be Continued.