[FFML] Quantum Destinies Side Story - Weekend Trip

[Jurai Knight]

*** Earth 0.000, 0.000

“One cannot live without being surrounded by others,” Fuyutsuki heard
himself say.

“One cannot live alone,” he heard a voice answering back. It sounded,
somewhat surprisingly, like it was Colonel Gendo Rokubungi’s.

Startled awake by a brief lurch, Fuyutsuki blinked, uncertain where he was
for a moment. He glanced around briefly, seeing other passengers involved
in their own interests, a few sleeping as the train made its way steadily
on the final leg of the trip from Tokyo and finally neared the vibrantly
growing city of Hakone. Sitting up, the treatise he had been re-reading
just before his brief nap slipped to the floor.

He bent forward and picked it up with a grunt, thinking about the odd
concepts contained within it. Contacting other worlds, seeing the many
different ways that history could have gone, they inspired fascinating
conjectures on the nature of reality. Even now, after Ranma’s project had
been terminated at the request of his father, reading this treatise still
inspired him to wonder sometimes if it could all be real, if other versions
of Earth actually existed.

The dream had been oddly ominous, but all he could recall was seeing an
older version of himself speaking with another man, that one hidden in
shadow, the two of them conversing together in a dimly-lit chamber,
speaking their lines in portentous tones.

He shrugged, not sure what his subconscious might be trying to tell him.
Perhaps his latest dream was simply a comment that he was getting older and
should try and do something about his solitary life. After all, it was said
that marriage was a younger man’s burden but an older man’s comfort. Not
that he was some doddering relic like in his dream, he hastily amended in
his thoughts.

Not yet.


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Weekend Trip
A Quantum Destinies Side-Story
A Ranma 1/2 Fanfic
By S. Thesken aka Jurai Knight (qd_author at hotmail.com)

Ranma 1/2 and its characters are owned by Rumiko Takahashi. This story is
inspired by her works and the stories from some of my fellow fanfic
authors. Among these are D.B. Sommer's "Shampoo 1/2", Jim Bader's "A Very
Scary Thought -aka- Nabiki 1/2", and John Biles' Elseworlds series. All C&C
is welcome.

The list of worlds occurring in this story:
Earth 0.000, 0.000 - The world of Scholar-Ranma (Baseline cluster)

Other chapters of this story may be found at this website, or you can email
the author for them:

http://www.fanfiction.net/u/3764932/


This story takes place sometime around Chapter Thirty of Quantum Destinies.

Just what does Professor Fuyutsuki do with his weekends anyway? It’s a look
at some Evangelion characters in this altered timeline.


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As the train slowly pulled into the station, Fuyutsuki was pleased to see
which one of his colleagues was waiting for the train’s arrival.

Sometimes he was the one needing to wait, especially if Dr. Katsuragi was
the one assigned to come pick him up that week. The man could be
frustratingly absent-minded. Perhaps to make up for that shortcoming, he
was an undeniably brilliant thinker within his chosen specialties.
Fuyutsuki was grateful to be working with him on the two fascinating
undertakings they were collaborating on for the benefit of the Empire at
the Ministry of Science’s Artificial Evolution Research Center, just so
long as he didn’t have to ride in a car with the man driving.

Katsuragi’s other flaw was that he was a maniac terror behind the wheel of
a vehicle.

Their first collaboration was Project Phoenix, an effort being carried out
with the ultimate goal of the betterment of humanity through an induced
upgrade of the human genome, one represented by Ranma Saotome and his
teenaged peers. It would soon be made available to all Imperial citizens.

Things were going quite well in that area, and the second phase of testing
was nearing completion. Psychological aberrations like the sociopaths and
megalomaniacs produced among the first phase’s test subjects had not been
observed. The various testing groups had begun interacting, and the
resulting social dynamics were proving to be quite fascinating and
informative to observe.

As ever more Newtypes began appearing and reaching physical maturity, it
was understood that there would have to be very careful monitoring of the
societal landscape to minimize any resulting social disruptions as their
numbers grew. Fortunately, another example of the megalomania exhibited by
Khan Noonian Singh and the clone of Shishio Makoto did not appear probable
to appear among the test subjects in this batch. That was a profound
relief. The last thing the Empire needed to deal with was a transhuman
monster like Keel Lorentz seemed intent on creating.

The discovery of the alien entity under Hakone, codenamed Lilith, had
enabled the creation of the Type-II Newtypes, and none of them would have
even existed without it. The Eucharist symbiote had mutated quite favorably
upon exposure to the growth medium Dr. Moreau utilized, using as its basis
the strange, bloodlike substance found surrounding the Lilith entity. The
elderly British scientist was celebrated for his inspired efforts with
Lilith, and the new symbiote had been one of many leaps forward in
bioscience that had taken place over the last two decades because of it.

Dr. Kado Kashuoh, a close colleague of Dr. Moreau’s and one of the founders
of the Artificial Evolution Research Center (before his abrupt departure
from there to pursue his own interests), had also benefitted greatly from
the discovery of Lilith. After obtaining approval from the Emperor, he had
invested his family’s resources into the creation of Genom Corporation
years ago, a company now known the world over for their various Lilith and
Samael lines of replicants.

Genom’s annual revenues were now greater than the GDP of a small country.

Project Prometheus, the second effort Fuyutsuki had become an integral part
of over the past few years, represented a radical new direction for
deploying the Empire’s military might in the world. After several
disturbing setbacks he didn’t care to dwell upon, the next generation of
war machines for the Empire’s forces was nearing completion, and the
prototype unit was almost ready to be demonstrated to the Emperor. With the
likes of Keel Lorentz and his terrorist SEELE organization working with the
other powers in the world, the Empire could not afford to be second best in
weaponry.

Both undertakings were planned to work in tandem, preparing for the final
unification and uplifting of humanity under the divine rule of the Emperor,
the man who held the Mandate of Heaven. But SEELE was racing for the finish
line as well, seeking to implement their twisted designs upon the world.
The Germans, Ottomans and Russians were working in close collaboration with
SEELE, pouring unimaginably vast sums of money and resources into the
organization’s efforts to achieve their goals. To oppose them, the Empire
had created a new organization to better utilize the abilities of the
children of Project Phoenix in combination with the weapons of Project
Prometheus.

The maddeningly incomplete copy of the Dead Sea Scrolls, damaged during
their acquisition from one of SEELE’s hidden labs in southern Europe,
painted an apocalyptic portrait of that organization’s final objective.
Operatives of the Security Directorate obtained it serendipitously over
sixteen years ago, but it was then stolen from them almost immediately by
one of Shadowlaw’s deadliest agents: the Contessa.

The woman had brutally murdered the entire team involved in the effort
before they could deliver it. As Shadowlaw and SEELE were known to be
enemies, battling each other in a vicious struggle to the death, a
secretive cold war fought out in back alleys and hidden lairs going back
for many centuries, this unfortunate team of Imperial agents had
unknowingly gotten caught in between the two criminal organizations’ latest
skirmish.

Getting the Scrolls back had been viewed by most in the Directorate’s
leadership as an impossible mission, but also one seen as vital for
obtaining a better understanding of SEELE’s goals and why Shadowlaw opposed
them so fiercely. Against this murderous, utterly ruthless woman, one agent
with a flawless track record at dealing with such situations had been
chosen to deal with her. Somehow, he managed to recover the documents back
from her grasp, albeit at great personal cost.

While the Contessa was widely believed to be dead at his hands, there were
still stories whispered about her to this day in the intelligence
communities. One story posited that she had left a daughter behind, but the
current whereabouts of said child was unknown. Another whispered tale was
she had switched sides to SEELE, in exchange for somehow restoring her back
to life.

Imperial intelligence efforts, using the Dead Sea Scrolls as a guide to
analysis of SEELE’s activities, led to the total destruction of Keel’s
Geofront base in Antarctica over six years ago. It vaporized in a ball of
atomic fire that had also taken three hundred of the Empire’s finest
soldiers with it in the process, and a vast region of that continent had
ended up sterilized of all life. But their great sacrifice had prevented
something that SEELE had codenamed “Second Impact” in intercepted
communiqués and bought the Empire vital amounts of time to prepare for the
inevitable endgame planned against the organization. There was even some
speculation that SEELE was behind the Mobius Institute’s current
precognitive blindness, but it was unknown how such a thing could have been
accomplished.

The Magi, the Institute’s three most powerful precognitives, had all
predicted with pants-wetting certainty the end of the Empire itself and a
cataclysmic loss of life going into the billions if Keel had been able to
succeed in executing his scheme as planned. The consensus view that had
emerged since then, as was reported to the Emperor by his top men when it
came to all of SEELE’s activities, was that the madman had been excavating
an alien lifeform deposited there, a counterpart to the entity discovered
under Hakone that provided the source material for Project Prometheus.

Well over a year after Keel’s “Second Impact” attempt had been barely
thwarted, several other communiqués referencing “Third Impact” were
intercepted. The Security Directorate was known to be extremely concerned,
wondering just what the hell SEELE was planning.

Someone in the Imperial bureaucracy had suggested the name NERV for the
Empire’s anti-SEELE organization, all in capital letters like it was some
kind of acronym, apparently to mock both SEELE and the Germans, their
primary backers. For his own reasons, the Emperor liked the sound of the
name, and it quickly became its official designation. Over the past several
years, the nascent organization had been drawing with an increasing demand
for resources from the Ministry of the Military, the Security Directorate
and the Ministry of Science. Genom Corporation, pioneers of numerous
biotechnological advancements in the Empire, had also been quite heavily
involved as well, obtaining numerous valuable patents for itself in the
process.

NERV was finally ready to become fully operational, an elite agency able to
operate in a self-contained fashion, and the city of Hakone had been
transformed into a company town wholly dedicated to supporting it. The
Artificial Evolution Research Center had been closed down after
transferring to NERV the staff working on Project Phoenix and Project
Prometheus. It had been three years since the changeover.

The NERV organization’s Technical Division was staffed by many recruits
from both the Ministry of Science and volunteers from Genom. Similarly, its
Tactical Operations Division was filled with transferees taken from the
Ministry of the Military. The Security Directorate had been tasked with
staffing NERV’s Internal Security Division, and it had responded with its
usual high levels of performance.

All the organization lacked was a commander who could direct its many
disparate parts and weld them all together into an efficient structure
serving the Emperor and defending the Empire’s citizens from SEELE. The
search was currently narrowing down to the final few candidates to find the
one who would be both clever enough and ruthless enough to satisfy the
Emperor that they were the right choice for the job. It would take someone
with exceptional ability in those two categories.

Fuyutsuki had been asked recently if he would consider taking a more active
role in the organization as head of NERV’s Technical Division, representing
the Ministry of Science in the chain of command, since he was one of the
main researchers previously working at the Artificial Evolution Research
Center. He was still in the process of considering it. Doing so would
require him to leave the Imperial Academy in other hands. Someone from the
Security Directorate would take over the role this time, as the two
ministries had traded control of it ever since its establishment.

He was currently leaning towards accepting the offer.

Fortunately, this would not deprive him of observing the endlessly
fascinating social dynamics of Newtypes from Project Phoenix. A select
group of them would be recruited to NERV to act as pilots when things drew
closer to a war footing with SEELE and the other nations of the world. As a
high-ranking officer, he would have the ability to make recommendations as
to who should compose that group. The addition of piloting duties would
likely be quite stimulating towards the inherent competitive nature of the
Newtypes, but hopefully it would also channel their energies against the
Empire’s enemies.

As the train pulled into the station, his thoughts returned to the present,
pleased to see Dr. Naoko Akagi was the one waiting for him on the platform.
She was checking her watch and clearly filled with her usual levels of
impatience with the world’s imperfections.

In charge of NERV’s main networked computer system, MAGI, she had
single-handedly designed its systems, naming both it and its three
subsystems after the precognitives of the Mobius Institute. With the
precognitive blindness the Institute was currently struggling with, MAGI
and its predictive algorithms were meant to act as a substitute along with
performing a wide range of other functions. Dr. Akagi was one of several
brilliant minds he enjoyed being able to work with, at least as long as her
sometimes quite fierce temper was kept under a modicum of self-control. Her
most powerful glares could wither a man where he stood and made even the
strongest-willed of their colleagues feel quite intimidated.

They had developed a close but occasionally combative relationship over the
past several years spent working together, and the two of them enjoyed
jousting at each other verbally in public. Quite some time ago, it had
become a regular event for them to have dinner alone together at her place
when he came down to Hakone, as he did once or twice a month. Afterwards,
the two of them would always enjoy some gently passionate intimacy with
each other before he had to return again to Tokyo and his duties at the
Academy.

After the first few such incidents had occurred spontaneously over the
course of a couple of months, they had talked the matter over at length.
She had informed him then that a more settled, serious sort of relationship
between them would be too difficult to pursue with their differing career
goals and personalities, so she had proposed to have a “friendship with
benefits” with him instead. Their liaisons began going on with almost
clockwork regularity for nearly a year when Naoko had shockingly revealed
to him that she was two months pregnant with his child. He had been quite
stunned she had never gotten an anti-fertility implant, and he had
immediately offered to marry her and be a proper father to the child. She
had refused him quite firmly, preferring to retain her independence and
raise their child on her own, admitting to him that she had been desirous
to have a baby for some time and had chosen him to “assist” her in this,
admiring his intellect.

That revelation had prompted a truly ugly argument between them.

Ritsuko, a healthy baby girl, was born seven months later.

Sometime before the birth, Naoko had purchased a Genom-made lilith named
Maya to help her around the house and act as Ritsuko’s nanny after she was
born, so she could return more quickly to work. After taking a bit of time
to heal hurt feelings on both their parts, they had gradually resumed their
relationship and even their prior levels of intimacy with each other.
Ritsuko did not yet know he was her father, but she was a very precocious
child and might already suspect.

Six months ago, based on the successes seen with the latest testing groups,
Naoko had brought Ritsuko to the Ministry of Science to test her for
compatibility with the Type-II Eucharist serum, even though it wasn’t yet
ready for widespread distribution. Dr. Katsuragi had also brought his own
daughter, Misato, Ritsuko’s playmate at school. Both had been cleared to be
given the serum, recovering from the treatment in only a couple of days.
Both scientists did not want their children to miss out on the opportunity,
given that the age ceiling was fast approaching for both girls.

As Fuyutsuki recalled, one other playmate from Ritsuko’s class had also
been given the serum, Ryoji, the son of the head of NERV’s Internal
Security Division, Hiroshi Kaji. The trio was practically inseparable, and
they were usually found playing together, or plotting some kind of childish
mischief. Ryoji was a very cheerful child, and while Fuyutsuki liked him,
he also felt oddly certain the Kaji boy was going to be a serial
heartbreaker someday.

Neither he nor Naoko had made much of an effort at seeing anyone else
seriously since her pregnancy, a fact left utterly unexamined by either of
them, and they were both fairly content to leave it so. But if he did
accept a permanent posting to Hakone, they would have to reevaluate their
relationship. He wanted to have a much larger role in Ritsuko’s life. A
child needed their father, and he hoped Naoko might be more amenable to an
offer of marriage from him this time. Neither of them was getting any
younger, and he doubted any other man would put up with Naoko’s sometimes
erratic personality like he could.

When he stepped off the train, she came over to him swiftly, tapping the
face of her watch meaningfully several times with a well-manicured index
finger. “We need to hurry. The first of today’s meetings is scheduled to
start in just a little over an hour. Moreau-hakase’s annoying bitch of an
assistant is likely looking forward to upbraiding me if we come in late.
You’re lucky you don’t have to deal with her on a full-time basis like I
do. I wish they’d just stayed in the backwoods of China, dealing with
renegade replicants.”

“Nice to see you too, Naoko-chan,” he said with a smile, enjoying the
opportunity to discomfit her. He noted she was dressed in one of NERV’s
khaki-colored uniforms underneath her long coat instead of civilian
clothing, the skirt reaching down to just above her knees. Despite her
advancing years, she still had an attractive figure and rather nice legs,
the result of her daily yoga workouts. She was also wearing the ruby
earrings he had given her for her birthday two years ago.

He could tell from the occasional nervous tics on her face that she was in
extreme need of some cathartic intimacy with him later, which he would be
happy to provide her. He reasoned that her heightened levels of stress were
probably due to her just voiced frustrations with Dr. Moreau’s assistant,
as she had never gotten along well with Silk. While he would hardly call
Dr. Moreau’s attaché a bitch, since she had always been respectful and
cordial towards him, he knew it would be highly impolitic of him to
disagree with Naoko on this particular issue. To maintain his good
relations with her, he chose to pick his battles very carefully with the
woman. He held off for now on asking about how their daughter was doing,
but he would do so over dinner.

She suddenly frowned when she saw his lingering regard of her body,
although she secretly found his attentions quite flattering and had been
looking forward to his arrival. Even so, her eyes flashed with low-level
irritation at him for his teasing tone, but then she became suddenly aware
of her lack of manners towards him and bowed to him in greeting. He
responded in kind, still smiling at her when they both stood back up
straight. He realized he would have to change into his uniform quickly
before the day’s meetings.

“Welcome back to Hakone, Kozo-kun,” she said a bit gruffly. “We should go
now. The others are already waiting at the Geofront.”

“Of course, Naoko-chan.” He picked up his bag. “Lead on. We wouldn’t want
to miss Moreau-hakase’s opening remarks.”

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

“My daddy’s visiting this weekend,” Ritsuko remarked to Misato, both girls
playing on the swings. Their mutual friend Kaji was involved in some rough
and tumble play with several of the boys their age over on the grass.

They were supposedly playing soccer, but apparently tackling was allowed.
The two girls winced when they saw six boys dogpile on top of Kaji, since
ganging up on him was the only way they could match his athletic abilities
on the field. When he staggered back to his feet after that, blood
streaming from his nose, they both felt relief.

“They told you yet?” Misato looked over at her friend quizzically.

“Nah, but it wasn’t very hard to figure out. Things seems a lot clearer to
me lately.”

“I know what you mean.” Misato pumped her legs harder, increasing the
length of her arc. Ever since they had their shots at the Ministry of
Science, it was remarkable how much slower their classmates now seemed. Her
daddy was now teaching her some basic mathematics at home.

Grinning, Ritsuko did the same, the two girls competing to see who could
swing higher. She was looking forward to seeing her father again, although
it was getting to be a pain to pretend she didn’t know the truth.


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This was an idea that came to me years ago and demanded to be written. I
couldn’t really fit it into the main storyline, so I’ve broken the scenes
out and made them into a side story after polishing it up a bit.
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