In which kids are kids

"A characteristic of the normal child is he doesn't act that way very often." - Author unknown.

The phone rang, and Ritsuko answered it hesitantly. It was Ryoji, which made her pretty nervous. But then, she always talked to him, so it wasn't like there was anything to be especially nervous about. He didn't really suspect a whole lot in that area. "Um, hey," she said. "What's up?"

"I uh, have some weird news," Ryoji said. "Do you remember the tabloid editor? I called him to say we couldn't send him any more photos, but he said he already had some."

Ritsuko's eyes widened. "What?" she asked. "But who could have taken them?" she asked.

"Well, in this case pretty much anyone," Ryoji pointed out. "The thing was floating over the city for a whole day. I'm sure lots of people have pictures and that's gonna make it pretty hard for them to be covering that sort of thing up. The real problem is that Nerv might not agree with us, I think. I mean, we could have just broken our word and taken more photographs, and sold them off for even more money."

"We should have," Ritsuko muttered. "How on earth would they prove that it was us in particular?" she argued.

Ryoji paused for a moment, and then responded, "Well, they probably will get on the tabloid's case at the rate things are going. Nerv probably figured that if we weren't taking photos then no one would be. Not very bright of them, really. Still... this Angel's going public."

Ritsuko looked over to her own camera, with which she'd taken a few pictures herself the previous night. Not to sell or anything foolish, just to keep the memory of each of the attacks, though really even that was unlikely. The strange octahedron had shone a perfect blue against the setting sun. "Yeah..." she agreed. "Though really I don't think that's what Nerv cared about." She remembered the media outrage about the presence of Jet Alone in the fight. That was the problem, the secrets like that.

The girl briefly considered sneaking out again every fight, just to try to document their crazy secrets. She quickly proposed the idea to Ryoji, hoping he would share her enthusiasm at the idea.

"What's the point in that?" he asked. "So Nerv had a secret robot. That's hardly the sort of secret that anyone needs to be concerned about. If they were, I dunno, enslaving people and forcing them to pilot, that would be pretty different. But there wasn't really anything wrong about what they did." He sounded, Ritsuko thought, pretty upset at the whole suggestion. "Besides, we'll just get in trouble again."

"Wouldn't it be worth it?" Ritsuko asked. "If they are keeping bigger secrets, I mean?"

Another pause on his end, and then finally, he said, "No. Not at all, I think."

Ritsuko sighed. "Come on, Ryoji! We barely got in any trouble at all! Did they even get our teacher written up for anything?" When he didn't answer after a moment, she pressed on. "Of course not! Nerv can't legally do anything anyways. There isn't even a law about civilians being required to stay in the shelters. Not yet anyway."

"But there are laws about truancy," Ryoji argued. "And they'd make those charges stick."

"Not if no one caught us!" Ritsuko insisted. "We're not going to do anything except sneak out there, take pictures, make sure nothing suspicious happens, and come back inside. We didn't get noticed before and we almost certainly won't get noticed again. I don't think any of the people who are in charge of us pay that much attention anyway. They're scared out of their minds because the big scary Angels are coming to get us." She snickered in derision at the attitudes of the security guards.

Ryoji didn't give a verbal answer, but if Ritsuko had to guess what his answer might be, the fact that he simply hung up the phone translated into a pretty strong "No." She sighed and leaned back in her chair. He had no sense of adventure, she thought. That wouldn't stop her, though. She now had plans, and they would be big ones. All of Nerv's secrets would be her own, she thought.

And hopefully, some of them would be the kind worth knowing.

3414:32:56

"Thanks for having me over," Kyoko said to Makoto after dinner. "My folks are out on business today and it gets pretty lonely being stuck at home by myself."

Makoto laughed. "No problem," he said. "My dad's pretty used to me having Shigeru over a lot, so it's not really much of a stretch for him to whip up another meal." He pointed towards the living room. "Wanna watch some TV?" he asked. "I dunno really what shows you like but hey, it could be fun."

Kyoko headed into the living room, smiling. "Yeah," she agreed. "Though honestly I think I would just like to watch the news at this point. There's been quite a lot of damage done to the city by that last Angel, and it would be good to hear that everything is going okay, you know?"

"Yeah," Makoto agreed. He grabbed the remote and switched the TV on, flipping through the channels to a news station and listening for a little while. Tokyo-3's local news, however, wasn't covering the Angel at the moment, but instead focusing on the results of Nerv's excessive power drain on the world; currently that was examining the hospitals which had not been properly equipped with generators and had lost patients as a result.

Makoto squirmed uncomfortably. "Can we watch something else, please?" he asked. When Kyoko didn't answer, he turned to her. She was staring in shock at the television, and didn't seem to have heard him. "Can we change the channel?" he asked again.

Kyoko turned to him, broken from her reverie. "Oh, yeah." She gulped. "Yeah this probably isn't the best channel to be watching right now," she agreed, stuttering over a few of her words.

Makoto quietly changed over to a channel currently featuring a game show, and sighed. "Sorry," he said. "It's just I still feel bad for Shigeru's little brother."

"Oh right!" Kyoko said, remembering. "Yeah... that's why he didn't come to the party, right? To visit the poor guy? How is he doing?"

"Well, he'll be let out of the hospital soon, I hear," Makoto said. "The injuries were pretty bad but they've mostly finished treating him up and I think they only kept him this long because it was the first Angel attack on the city. They were probably worried about relapses and things like that," he explained. "Uh, since for all we know Angel's could be radioactive or poisonous or something weird like that."

Kyoko shifted in her seat. "That's um..." Her eyes widened a little. "That's pretty unpleasant sounding, to be honest. I hope that nothing like that is real," she added. "I much prefer the Angels when the biggest problem with them is that they're huge."

She got a nod in repsonse. "Yeah. I mean, it would suck if they relaly could drive you crazy just by looking at you or something. How could we fight stuff like that?"

"We could put the Evas in blindfolds," Kyoko suggested jokingly, and giggled a bit at her own joke. Makoto had to admit, inwardly, that the idea of the giant robots being forced to wear giant blindfolds to stay safe was... Well, it was a healthy distraction from the misery that usually surrounded them.

"Yeah..." he agreed again, and tried to think of something funny to suggest as an alternative. He couldn't come up with anything, though. He decided to abandon that thought all together, and turned his attention to the game, where people were making idiots out of themselves, wearing ridiculous puffed up costumes and being led through a maze of an obstacle course by an announcer, who laughed the loudest whenever one of the contestants got abused by something in the course.

Still, it was pretty tame for a game show.

"Do you think our band is ever actually going to happen?" Kyoko asked suddenly. "Because we spend a lot of time practicing for it and almost no time doing anything."

"To be honest?" Makoto said. "We're probably not going to get anything done ever. That's just... kind of the way Ritsuko is, sometimes. We need another player besides." Remembering Kyoko's earlier protests, he asked, "Are you going to stop hanging out with us if the band falls through?"

Kyoko laughed. "Probably not," she admitted. "You guys are too weird not to hang out with."

3413:49:36