Crazy quick idea: Neon Genesis Evangelion by way of Ocean Punk. Talking a kind-of-but-not-quite crossover with SeaQuest DSV, Subnautica, Dark Life and similar underwater sci-fi.
Second Impact screwed up life in coastal areas anyway so looking to expand into living on the oceans and on the bottom of them sounds like a good idea. Probably NERV sells out LCL as fluorocarbons for rebreathers (a la The Abyss) without telling people why the heck they smell like blood, and gain quite a lot of moolah out of it while also making deep underwater exploration more accessible.
When the Angels come, there's also a weakness to be exploited from living in Japan that they could use: Japan's a big island, in the Ring of Fire. So... cause tectonic mayhem? They can exploit the faults that are on the bottom of the ocean where not even subs can go. They can go for a very long war of attrition by blowing up all ships and planes (and sub-orbitals) that try to get there to give supplies. And so on.
If you want to make a Superwomen of Eva story in which, say for example, one of the girls is Aquagirl, then that's a possible justification for her. She's the only one that can defuse those attempts at sabotage and force the Angels to come to where the other superwomen (if there's any) can fight.
The Cosmopolitan Fictioneer
I popped this question in the main thread, but apparently nobody's interested in even acknowledging its existence.
How would you assign the five temperaments (Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, Melancholic, and Leukinenote ) between Rei, Asuka, Hikari, Mari, Mana and Mayumi? Please note that for convenience's sake, "Phlegmatic" is defined as the intermediate between all of the four other temperaments; you can consult this page
for descriptions of the temperaments, since the trope article focuses too much on the original four-temperament model and doesn't adequately explain what the fifth temperament is like.
If you ask me, I would assign it as follows:
- Sanguine: Mari.
- Choleric: Asuka.
- Phlegmatic: Mana.
- Melancholic: Rei.
- Leukine: Mayumi, Hikarinote .
Well, just because they don't need to worry about being caught doesn't mean they won't go the extra mile to make sure. They aren't idiots, they're criminals.
And a possible variant on the scenario is that the trio were replaced with healthy clones that lived full lives before growing old and dying of natural causes. But at that point we're running into the matter of "if they can clone people like that, then why didn't they just keep the clones and experiment on those rather than risking kidnapping the originals?", to which my best answer is "maybe they already tried but discovered that speed-grown clones are incompatible with the augmentations for some reason and not speed-growing them would take too much time".