--- "Pablo R. Ar�valo" <pra6@humboldt.edu> wrote:

And now, I'm off to class, where I'll hopefully keep
my facts a little
more together.  Although, given the way things are
running today, I
just hope I have no surprise quizzes or anything...

But *she* never had one, did she?  ^_-

---

Shinji did not know how long he had been staring, once
he figured it out.  Outwardly, there had been little
unusual about Rei: she was just lying down, reading a
book.  But something about her suggested it was all
wrong.

For starters, she was obviously frustrated.  Rei
Ayanami almost never showed emotion.  When she did, it
was joy, and even then only to Gendo.  But Gendo was
not around, only Shinji and Rei, and as far as he knew
Rei had not noticed him yet.

Then there was the book itself.  Despite his distance
and despite Rei's hands covering part of the cover, he
could tell it was a children's book, especially when
she took one hand to trace or underline the symbols on
the page, struggling to pronounce them.  And they were
symbols to her, of that he was now certain.  Not words
or sentences, not pieces of information waiting to be
read.  Just nearly meaningless jumbles of symbols.

He had heard rumors, of course.  Of how NERV
instructed the teachers never to call on her, and of
how they constantly switched out her actual test
papers for forgeries.  All to keep her grades
tolerable enough that she could maintain the illusion
of attending school, a school that even to him seemed
to be becoming more and more a tool to give some
veneer of a normal life, something for the children to
hold onto to keep them from believing their entire
lives were Eva pilots and they had no meaning beyond
that.  But Shinji had been starting to see through
that veil of late, and he was certain Rei held no such
fantasy.  Why else would she constantly look to NERV
during class, as if wondering when this interruption
would be over so she could get back to her real life?

She said she had no memory of her early childhood.  In
truth, her life started when she was 7 or 8, and she
began learning from there.  Ritsuko had recently been
going on about "uploading" basic skills into Rei "if
we ever need another Rei".  But this Rei did not have
the benefit of that, and even her normal schooling was
largely suspended so she could be a test subject for
the Eva project.  Indeed, it might well have been that
they started sending Rei to school just so Shinji
would not feel as awkward, not that he expected anyone
to admit to it, nor did he feel it worthwhile to
trouble anyone by asking.

So perhaps he should not have been so surprised to
learn that Rei could not read.

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