Fanfic / EVA Sessions: Someplace Vast and Dry

In 2015, something happened in Antarctica that changed the course of human events. From that point, dimensional rifts open all over the world, and strange creatures pour through them, forcing humanity to fight a war for survival. The lives of a small group of scientists and their children, led by Gendo and Yui Ikari, get entangled in the conflict as they struggle to create weapons capable to defeat the enemy, clash against politicians... and try to raise their children properly.

EVA Sessions: Someplace Vast and Dry is a Alternate Continuity Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfic written by Gob Hobblin, whose premise is that Second Impact was a genuine accident, when the Katsuragi Expedition's investigation into unusual phenomena at the South Pole accidentally unleashes transdimensional beings upon Earth. What follows is a retelling of events leading up to an alternate version of the original series, with chapters alternating between extensive worldbuilding highlighting the aftereffects The Event had on geopolitics and society, and Slice of Life moments of NERV staff and their families.

As of 25 February 2020, Someplace Vast and Dry has hit 57 chapters, and while the story has remained dormant since August 2015, it can be read on fanfiction.net.

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Tropes:

• Adaptational Badass:
  • Asuka's father Martin Langley is a former Feldwebel (Sergeant) in the German Army, and briefly worked as a security contractor for NERV. He later starts teaching Rei and Asuka martial arts when the girls get tapped to become Evangelion pilots.
  • Fuyutsuki is an academic variant; whereas Fuyutsuki in canon was based in a small underfunded lab at Kyoto University and would be eventually reduced to working as an unlicensed back-alley doctor after Second Impact, Someplace's Fuyutsuki is a respected bioengineering researcher with the university naming an entire state-of-the-art research building after him.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: Kaworu Nagisa's hair is blue instead of the canonical silver grey. Justified in that he was created by SEELE using Lilithian cell samples stolen from NERV during the Golden Army terrorist incident.
• Adaptational Heroism: Gendo runs NERV strictly as an agency to defend humanity against he Others, without any ulterior motives.
  • Back in Antarctica, Gendo assumed leadership of the Katsuragi Expedition immediately after his friend Dr. Katsuragi was killed at Ground Zero of The Event, and organized the successful evacuation of all surviving scientists; in contrast, canon Gendo was instructed by SEELE to leave one day before Dr. Katsuragi unknowingly triggered Second Impact.
• Adaptational Wimp: SEELE is merely a rival anti-Other agency left over from the GEHIRN-NERV split, rather than an all-powerful Ancient Conspiracy doubling as a Government Conspiracy manipulating the United Nations from behind the scenes.
  • Chairman Lorenz Kihl has far fewer political, corporate and scientific allies compared to Gendo and Yui's NERV.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • Rei's surname is Ikari rather than Ayanami, as she is raised as (one of) Gendo and Yui's daughter(s)
  • The Angels from the original series are here called Messengers, and described as advanced versions of the otherwise-primitive eldritch abominations collectively referred to as the Others.
  • Averted with Misato, who retains her late biological father Dr. Katsuragi's surname, despite being adopted by Gendo and Yui
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
  • Gendo is particularly close to his children, particularly Shinji (biological son), Misato (adopted daughter) and Rei (half-daughter from Yui's side with Lilithian genetic material).
  • Fuyutsuki is simply Yui's former professor without any hints of unrequited attraction to his student; he also has a far more congenial working relationship with Gendo, with both men frequently bouncing ideas off each other.
  • Martin Langley is similarly a devoted husband to Kyoko and a Doting Parent to Asuka, in contrast to his (unnamed) canon counterpart, who was neglectful to his daughter at best and an adulterer at worst.
  • Naoko is much more supportive of her daughter Ritsuko.
  • Gendo, Yui, Kyoko and Naoko and the late Dr. Katsuragi were all implied to be colleagues and friends in academia.
  • Misato and Ritsuko were close friends since High School, rather than meeting each other later at University
  • Shinji and Rei were Childhood Friends with Asuka since the age of three; in particular, Rei and Asuka's friendship persisted even after the latter moved away with her father to Switzerland after her mother's death.
• Alien Autopsy:
  • Yui arranges for the US Army to transfer Lilith's body to the Kyoto University's Fuyutsuki Annexe, where she, her eponymous mentor and their colleagues dissect the remains to better understand the biology of the Others.
  • NERV later cuts up the remains of the first Messenger to attack Tokyo-3, mainly for disposal but also taking samples for further study.
• Alternate Continuity: The entire timeline is shifted forward by fifteen years, such that The Event (Someplace's version of Second Impact) takes place in 2015 rather than 2000, allowing for a Setting Update.
• Brain Uploading: Accidentally occurs to Kyoko, with her soul completely migrating into Unit-02 one minute after her death. She is able to access the MAGI supercomputer's resources and continue to converse with her living colleagues through computer terminals, although only Gendo, Yui and Naoko are privy to this secret.
• Career-Ending Injury: Misato is critically wounded while serving in a JSSDF anti-Other and peacekeeping operation in Indonesia, and because she now requires artificial organs to live, she is no longer fit for front-line duty. Gendo arranges for her to instead transfer to NERV as Operations Director, her canonical role in the original series.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Implied with Shinji and Asuka, who fought each over Shinji's stuffed penguin doll, that he later voluntarily gave her as a parting gift when she had to move away after her mother's death, and which she would cherish to the present day.
• Child Soldiers: Heavily discussed before being played straight. One of the driving conflicts of the fic is that NERV doesn't want to employ the three children as child Soldiers in their war against the Others, in direct contradiction to how NERV operates in most versions of Evangelion, both official and fan related, where nobody seems to bat an eye at the usage of child soldiers, and if they do, it isn't enough to convince anyone to oppose it. Here, NERV avoids doing so for the longest time, constantly trying to find grown humans who can pilot them instead, until an attack by one of the Messengers forces Naoko to put Rei into an Evangelion for the first time, leading to said Messenger's destruction. Afterwards, NERV begins to grudgingly accept that they will have to employ the children as pilots, though Gendo and Yui have yet to bring Shinji back from America for piloting purposes.
• Clones Are People, Too: Rei and the Mermaids (Haru, Sakura, Kei, Tsukiko, Mari, Aimi, Momo, Kimu and Aya) were all created by Yui and Kyoko using frozen samples of Yui's own ovum and artificial sperm containing genetic material from Lilith; however, each of the girls quickly develop distinct personalities, and practically all NERV staff recognize them as Gendo and Yui's daughters.
• Cool Big Sis: Misato is a straightforward example, as she is literally Shinji's and Rei's adopted older sister without the Parental Substitute and Mrs. Robinson subtexts of her canon counterpart; Asuka also fondly remembers her as her babysitter.
• Dead Guy Junior: Gendo named his son Shinji after his late friend and colleague, Dr. Shinji Katsuragi.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • Ryoji Kaji is merely mentioned off-screen as Misato's ex-boyfriend; justified in that this story takes place prior to canon events
  • Pen-Pen is simply the name of Shinji's (and later Asuka's) non-sentient stuffed penguin doll.
• Dying as Yourself: Kyoko briefly regains lucidity long enough to tell Asuka how much she loves her, before dying from a stroke caused by a combination of her Contact Experiment-induced dementia and complications from a head injury inflicted by a terrorist during the hostage situation at the NERV Evangelion Center six months before.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The NERV Evangelion Center originally started out as an conventional above-ground research center, before gradually transitioning most of it facilities to the canonical underground GeoFront to better protect them from attack by the Others. In this case, the NERV GeoFront is an genuine achievement of human civil engineering, rather than the canonical repurposing of the buried remains of the object that brought life to earth.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Others, transdimensional creatures that emerge from portals to attack and occupy human population centers, which range from feral animals with herd-like behavior to semi-intelligent forms capable of primitive tactical coordination
  • The Messengers, advanced versions of the Others and essentially the story's version of the canonical Angels
• Exposition Beam: Lilith subjects Yui to a mind-meld, to warn her of the Others' plans to eradicate humanity.
• Eye Scream: Shinji's bodyguard Hunter is shot in the eye while protecting his principal from Strannix's mercenary team; he later has an advanced prosthetic replacement courtesy of Sarif Industries.
• False Flag Operation: Kihl frequently hires assassins and mercenaries to conduct operations under the guise of various terrorist groups and extremist factions, to eliminate opponents to the consolidation of GEHIRN/SEELE's power and to undermine NERV's autonomy. The raid on the NERV Evangelion Center and the attempted kidnapping of Rei and her "Mermaid" sisters was publicly attributed to the Golden Army, an otherwise obscure American anti-NERV group.
• Feud Episode: Yui decks Naoko for deploying Unit-00 with Rei as the pilot against the Messenger attacking Tokyo-3, even though Rei was the one who convinced Naoko to let her try in the first place. As of Chapter 57, it remains to be seen whether they would reconcile.
• Godzilla Threshold: After an AWACS reconnaisance aircraft and an Carrier Air Wing are decimated by the Others emerging from the transdimensional rift in Antarctica, the U.S. Navy task force originally dispatched to evacuate the (thousands) of surviving scientists from the Katsuragi Expedition launches a Fenris nuclear fusion missile to seal the rift.
• Happily Adopted: Gendo and Yui adopted Misato Katsuragi after her father's death in Antarctica, and as a result of having stable parent figures throughout her late childhood, Misato grows up to be more emotionally stable than her canon counterpart.
• Healing Factor: Unlike her canon self, Rei can rapidly heal from cuts and bruises within minutes, an effect first discovered when she gashed her nose against a coffee table as a toddler; Kyoko theorized she could theoretically even regenerate missing limbs or organs, although this has yet to be examined in the story so far.
• Human Popsicle: Gendo and Yui secretly have Kyoko's body frozen, in hopes of one day reversing the circumstances that caused her soul to be trapped inside Unit-02.
• Hostage Situation: Bill Strannix's mercenaries, backed by Kihl and under the guise of an obscure anti-NERV terrorist group, infiltrate and take over the NERV Evangelion Center under the premise of denouncing American involvement; their real goal is to kidnap Rei or one of her sisters for their human-Lilithian hybrid genetic makeup.
• I'm Dying, Please Take My MacGuffin: A dying Lilith offers her own "flesh" - specifically, her body and its genetic code - to Yui, explicitly instructing her to reverse-engineer them into weapons to defend humanity with.
• It Can Think: The Others soon show signs of primitive intelligence, and begin using primitive tactics against human forces.
• Good Parents:
  • Gendo and Yui Ikari to Misato (via adoption), Shinji (their natural-born biological son), Rei and her sisters (human-Lilithian hybrids)
  • Martin Langley and Kyoko Zeppelin-Soryu to Asuka
  • Naoko Akagi to Ritsuko
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover:
  • Ex-Navy SEAL and CIA operative-turned-mercenary William "Bill" Strannix gets hired by Kihl to kidnap Rei and her "Mermaid" sisters from the NERV Evangelion Center, and later, make an attempt on Shinji's life at the latter's safehouse in Detroit.
  • David Sarif is one of NERV's chief backers through his company Sarif Industries, and later dispatches Adam Jensen to help rescue Shinji and his bodyguard Hunter from a safehouse in Detriot under siege by SEELE-backed mercenaries
  • Daisuke Aramaki of the Public Security Bureau becomes the government agency version of Friend on the Force for Gendo, providing him with intelligence regarding SEELE activities and sending Motoko Kusanagi's team to help defuse a hostage situation at the NERV Evangelion Center
  • Arnold Rimmer cameos as a NERV technician who assists Naoko Akagi in starting up Unit-00 for the first time with Rei as its pilot.
  • Peter Bishop visits NERV as a representative of Massive Dynamic, another potential backer that Yui and Naoko are attempting to sway to their side over SEELE.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: In addition to her natural-born biological son Shinji and adopted daughter Misato Katsuragi, Yui also grew Rei and nine other human-Lilithian hybrids ex vivo in artificial wombs using frozen samples of her own ovum and artificial sperm containing Lilithian genetic material, as test specimens for research towards the eventual development of actual Evangelions.
• Meaningful Name: Kihl explicitly explains to a SEELE council member that Kaworu's surname Nagisa is formed from the characters for shi and sha, resulting in shisha or "messenger"; this, along with the conscious decision to give an otherwise Caucasian European-looking boy a Japanese name, is intended to send Gendo and Yui a message that despite the GEHIRN/NERV split, SEELE's bioengineering expertise has now caught up with that of NERV's.
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: Invoked with Kaworu, who is engineered by SEELE scientists to be physically ten years old in a span of six months, as Kihl intends for him to be around the same age as Rei, Shinji and Asuka.
• Pronouncing My Name for You: Shinji's bodyguard Hunter Vaas, an Afrikaner, explains that his name is pronounced XOON-ter.
• Properly Paranoid: As Japan became increasingly militaristic following Arrival Day, Yui dreaded the thought that her then-unborn son Shinji would one day die in a far-off battlefield with a rifle in hand, a fear not assuaged when her adopted teenage daughter Misato announced she wanted to enlist in the JSSDF to join the fight against the Others once she was old enough. Eight years later, Misato is critically wounded during a JSSDF operation in Indonesia, when her convoy is ambushed by a local terrorist militia.
• Soul-Powered Engine: The Evangelions, just like in canon:
  • Unit-00 was induced into Resonance by Naoko and Yui using cell samples from Rei her "Mermaid" sisters.
  • Unit-01 copied Yui's soul during her Contact Experiment, just before NERV staff managed to pull the latter out in time.
  • Unit-02 contains the fully-intact soul of Kyoko Zeppelin-Soryu, due SEELE-backed mercenaries sabotaging her Contact Experiment.
• Shipper on Deck: Rei often teases Asuka over the latter's not-so-secret lingering feelings for her brother Shinji.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Yui, since unlike her canon counterpart, had no motive to allow herself to be absorbed into Unit-01, and was safely extracted at the last minute by NERV staff who terminated the Contact Experiment at the first sign of danger
  • Naoko, due to having a much better relationship with the rest of the cast; in particular, she is not involved in an affair with Gendo, and acts like an Honorary Aunt to Rei
  • The Katsuragi Expedition suffers far fewer casualties, as the dying Dr. Katsuragi kept his instruments at the South Pole running long enough for Gendo to organize the evacuation of the remaining members.
  • Old Tokyo itself was spared from its canonical destruction when the N2 device intended for it is accidentally prematurely detonated in Aomori instead.
• The Stations of the Canon:
  • A world-changing disaster caused by alien monsters devastates much of the southern hemisphere
  • Misato still dates (and eventually breaks up with) Ryoji Kaji during their university years
  • Kyoko eventually dies from complications from a botched Contact Experiment
  • Shinji still gets sent away from home for his own safety
  • Rei and Asuka are the First and Second of the NERV scientists' children to be recruited as Evangelion pilots
• Tokyo Is the Center of the Universe: Realistically averted, in contrast to the original source material.
  • The first wave of the Others on Arrival Day targeted South America, Australia, Africa and the Middle East.
  • Later attacks occur in Paris and New York.
  • The Capstone is discovered in Afghanistan.
  • Unit-00 makes its operational debut when the Others attack Tokyo-3 for the first time.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Misato and Ritsuko, with the former often having to borrow more feminine clothing from the latter.
• Trick-and-Follow Ploy: In one of the side chapters, the Others use this in conjunction with Spare a Messenger: they leave a grievously-wounded Moroccan soldier alive after wiping out a human outpost, allow passing Tuareg nomads seeking a reward to rescue him, before following the them back to the next human military base to attack.
• We ARE Struggling Together:
  • Despite the worldwide invasion and occupation of human territories by the Others, various nations frequently use the chaos to settle old scores over age-old territorial and ideological disputes; India and Pakistan bomb each other effectively back into the Stone Age with their N2 arsenals.
  • The original NERV pact formed to develop defenses against the Others is constantly marred by infighting, due to Gendo and Yui's distaste for the GEHIRN supervisory council chairman Lorenz Kihl's growing ambitions. Eventually, Gendo leads the bulk of NERV to secede along with their American, British and Japanese backers, leaving Kihl to reorganize the remnants of GEHIRN into SEELE with French and German support.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: Aimi, one of the Mermaids, is explicitly described as such; she speaks in a formal and refined manner, as well as often defusing minor tiffs between the other Mermaids.

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