Aeon Natum Engel

Asuka, Shinji, and Rei.
Now with even less sanity!

And thus it begins. The saving of the world.

—Gendo Ikari, Ashcroft Representative of Europe.

Aeon Natum Engel is a Neon Genesis Evangelion/Cthulhu Tech/F.E.A.R. crossover fanfic.

If that combination doesn't tell you the general feel and theme of the story, then nothing will.

There are the local Starfish Aliens, the Migou, who control the polar regions and are systematically trying to push humanity back down to the Stone Age. There is the Half-Human Hybrid cult of the Esoteric Order of Dagon who tirelessly search for the lost city of R'lyeh in order to awake Cthulhu. There are the Disciples of the Unnamable who are divided into the Diabolical Masterminds of the Death's Shadow who seek to corrupt humanity and the Omnicidal Maniacs of the Rapine Storm with the goal of wiping them out. Not to mention that the second largest Mega Corp is controlled by Nyarlathotep. And that's just the default Cthulhu Tech setting. And on top of that, someone let Gendo Ikari into a senior position in the largest Mega Corp (which, because it controls the Magitek on which the society is built, is basically a wing of the government), and strange beings designated as "Heralds" (and named after Canaanite deities) are attacking.

And if that wasn't bad enough, Rei is apparently the product of Project Herkunft (Origin). Feel free to start gibbering.

To describe it...well, you know how certain other Evangelion fan-fics head straight for the Crazy Awesome, blending Grimdark and Rule of Cool in a seamless mix which creates a valiant effort which goes beyond the impossible, kicks reason to the curb, and undoes the bleakness of Evangelion? Well, Aeon Natum Engel doesn't. It's cold, it's hard, and it's cynical. Logistics and planning beats hotbloodedness and bravery, and, despite that, humanity is still losing. The "good guys" do monstrous things in the name of survival, the "bad guys" are very hard to tell from the "good guys", and the really bad guys are...well, really bad indeed. It's very well written, and stylish, in a dark, understated kind of way, and sometimes induces headaches from the sheer amount of elaborate plotting, but don't go into it thinking that it's necessarily light reading.

It may help to make notes... and to have the external memory device plugged in. Finally, as a result of author dissatisfaction with the fic after its finale, a rewritten version is underway, entitled Aeon Entelechy Evangelion.

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Tropes used in Aeon Natum Engel include:

See Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cthulhu Tech, and F.E.A.R. for other tropes which might appear.

• A Death in the Limelight: Oh, hell yes. He makes you feel sorry for cultists. That's an achievement.
• Alien Geometries: A running theme, as might be guessed. The most notable is probably the Fifth Herald, Mot (the reskinned Ramiel), which ends up after being nuked as a fractal. Also noted in the Dream Sequence that the cultist experienced, although, in fairness, that sort of thing is more common in dreams.
• All There in the Manual: There are the Items (3 so far), which are annotated in-universe images documents. They've produced a fair bit of speculation in the forum thread where they get posted. There is also a cast list posted in the same thread which gave us something interesting to think about. Also due to its strange relationship with ANE, the thread for NGE: Nobody Dies has also some interesting information.
• Alternate Universe: A very brief glimpse in the AT-Field of the original EVA 01 having its head function as a two-way blood geyser.
• Ancient Conspiracy: AHNUNG (re-skinned SEELE)
• And I Must Scream: Directly referenced in chapter 15b.
• Amazon Brigade: The Replica Elite are female; apparently, it makes them easier to control with their heightened aggression and cunning.
• A Simple Plan: Operation CATO. Punch through the Dagonite lines, complete the ritual the Order had already started, capture the Herald. Relatively simple, right? It Got Worse.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: The Heralds.
• The Antichrist: Foreshadowed.
• Anticlimax Boss: Shalim-Shachar (re-skinned Israfel, the 7th Angel) is eliminated early. Dancing is way too silly in this setting. Inverted with Moloch (re-skinned Sandaphalon, the 8th Angel) which is turned from a rather anti-climatic Angel defeated by egregious middle-school physics into a giant escalating battle spanning the length of a conventional novel, that just gets worse and worse.
  • Word of God says that if there was an ANE anime, Operation CATO would be the season 1 finale.
• Anti-Villain: It can be argued that, from an non-anthrocentric point of view, the Migou are the true heroes of this piece, for all that they're xenocidal self-interested fungoid-insects.
• Author Appeal: The author seems to like:
  • Hard Sci-fi
  • Anime, of the deconstructed variety.
    • Deconstruction in general.
  • Time travellers, aliens, and psychics Yes, the Great Race of Yith, the Migou, and parapsychics all appear.
  • Cynicism.
    • He regularly posts to Star Destroyer.net, Spacebattles.com, and RPG.net.
  • Real Time Strategy, almost certainly at least one Command & Conquer game.
  • Tabletop RPGs
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Yul'uth-ca the Star Spawn Priest.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Moloch, technically.
• Awesome but Impractical: Objectively, the Evas before they got the Daeva engine upgrade. Subjectively, how the most of the military sees them.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: Various fanatics from the Order, most notably one Guh'maena.
• BFG: In the fight against Mot, (re-skinned Ramiel, the 5th Angel) they take a partially-constructed frigate and tear off all the unimportant parts so that they can case it in cooling devices and pump the entire arcology power grid into its ventral laser.
  • Also: the pre-CATO refits, which give the Units, in order, a particle beam, a plasma-firing minigun, and a plasma lance, run off a capital-ship grade D-Engine. The capital-grade charge beam which Unit 00 now carries (and which has been dubbed the "Rei Gun"), can be hooked up to the other two Units though umbilical cables and run off their D-Engines as well, for something which produces mushroom clouds when it hits. And killed Dagon, a rather horrible number of Migou ships (to the extent that the NEG Command were really impressed), and managed to discorporate Moloch before blowing up from overuse.
  • Foxtrot 813's and other Replica's standard issue is a ECU-IMFW-3 (Imphaw for short) which is a powered up version of the Repeating Cannon from the first F.E.A.R. with an underslung Assault Rifle. Moreover, the Replica Elite carry the nasty EnergyWeapons from FEAR, which put power armour killing power in the hands of infantry
• BFS: The DF-Spear, an Eva-scale spear with a core made from the crystalline structure of Mot, which conducts AT-Fields exceptionally well.
  • Now retired, due to its tendency to tear a nasty hole in the spacetime continuum when two very strong AT-Fields clash, almost forming a new Zone and destroying Units 01 and 02.
  • And that's nothing compared to Лu-hvean'tahæn, which is...well, it has its own AT-Field. I think that's enough alone, even if it wasn't used by a Star Spawn, scaled appropriately.
• Balance of Power: The defenses of Order-controlled Iceland are based behind this principle: If either the NEG or Migou wants to conquer it, one needs to deploy a considerable amount of forces that will leave holes in defense elsewhere, and the other will take advantage of it.
• Bilingual Bonus: Quite apart from the puns or references often involved in the names of Ashcroft Groups and Projects, there is untranslated German poetry scattered through the story.
• Black and Grey Morality: The NEG and the Ashcroft Foundation do some pretty not-nice things, in the name of survival, even before we get into the Evangelion and FEAR bits. Meanwhile, the Migou are shown to have a fairly good point (that humanity is in fact totally irresponsible with its reality-breaking arcanotechnology), and the Dagonites have been shown, in the Villain Episode, to not entirely be monsters, at least along themselves. Word of God says that he's never going to do the same for the Rapine Storm, though. Intersects with...
• Blue and Orange Morality
• Booby Trap: The Replica Elite loves these.
• Bound and Gagged: You don't need ropes and gags when all you have to do is to wedge a knife between C4 and C5 of the neck, inducing quadriplegia.
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: After the discussion on Children Of An Elder God's apparent revival, Earth Scorpion said that his fic will have the proper Mythos ending, although considering the crossover series, it's not that surprising.
• Bug War: Subverted. Although the Migou are insectoid, they're a cyberdemocratic, technologically advanced species who (when the readers get to see inside their heads) sound worryingly reasonable in their genocide against humanity, and who view humanity as the out-of-control bioweapons.
• Canon Discontinuity: Earth Scorpion considers a recent supplement book (Mortal Remains) to be pretty subpar. With post-Core and post-Vade Mecum supplements in general, if it's not in the fic itself, then it either doesn't exist or it's very minor, usually as part of...
• Characterization Marches On: The Migou.
• Chekhov's Armoury
• Child Soldiers: Lampshaded and deconstructed, as might be expected. Project Evangelion gets called on it by wings of the "proper" military several times.
• Cloning Blues: When each of the main fusion series has this as one of the important plot-devices...
• Combat Pragmatist: Almost everybody considering the nature of the fic, but the Replica Elites fill the cake with explosives and leave it for someone to find, then pick off the survivors as they stand, covered in the remains of their friends.
• Cosmic Horror Story: It's a Mythos story. It has added Evangelion. What else would it be?
• Crapsack World: It's HP Lovecraft meets Evangelion (squared, because of how it inspired Cthulhu Tech) meets First Encounter Assault Recon. Bleak doesn't even go anywhere near describing the outlook for humanity.
• Crazy Awesome: Oh, sure, the fic may act like it's trying to avert it. But, really, a fight between a Star-Spawn with a Mythos-ized Barrier Jacket and Intelligent Device (Signum's to be specific) playing the role of Asuka, versus lobotomized-Cthuloid-monster-Engels playing the MP Evas (so, pretty much the same thing), in a re-enactment of the climactic battle of End of Evangelion, under the sea, in a giant grotto with a statue of Cthulhu that gets used in the fight? Yeah, it's Crazy Awesome.
• Crazy Enough to Work: How the Plasma Minigun was created.
• Creepy Child: Surprisingly averted with the daughter of the cultist in chapter 12. Yes, she may be a Deep One hybrid, and was implied to be a weak precognitive. She still just squabbles with her siblings and acts like an eight-year old does.
  • Played straight with Alma...who appears to be Rei's mother. We're all doomed.
    • Yes, she is. Yes, we are. The End.
• Creepy Doll: Five of them in the cultist's nightmare.
• Crossover: If we ignore for a moment that ANE is one, it has a rather interesting meta-relationship with NGE: Nobody Dies
• Culture Clash: As the latter chapters shows, all sides in Aeon War have a radically different views on what's good and what's bad.
• Cyberspace: The realm of Magi Operators. That said, Cyberspace Is A Scary Place
• Deadpan Snarker: Almost every character shows some elements of this, most notably Shinji."Almost" isn't exclusive of Rei.
• Decade Dissonance: The technology level of Order-controlled Iceland mainly consists of outdated Second Cold War-Era equipment and occasional First Arcanotech War gear.
• Defensive Feint Trap: The Esoteric Order of Dagon built half a city with the intent of blowing it up once the invaders got close enough. That is to speak nothing of the nuclear torpedoes they held back 'till the least opportune moment.
• Despair Event Horizon: The arrival of the ACTUAL Migou warships has this effect on many people, enough to consider (and implement) some very desperate measures.
• Did Not Do the Research: The in-universe film, Snake Fist (which the name of an in-universe film in Project Origin), is a) very popular, and b) packed with this trope, to the extent that it has a telekinetic katana-wielding Nazzadi actor as the lead even though it's set 50 years before the Nazzadi were created. From the trailer shown, it appears that it just involved slamming every action move trope together.
  • Although the fic is generally quite good at avoiding it, prior to it being pointed out correct, the Deep Ones were noted as being heavily dependent on IR vision, and almost blind to green. Guess what seawater (you know, where the Fish People live) is almost opaque to, and what it lets through?
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Rei, did you just blow up Dagon? Fettel, did you just mindrape Dagon!?
• Discontinuity Nod: The Migou really considered moving a second [Exclusion Volume] [Containment and Defence] Planetoid (read: Hive Ship) to Earth, but recent Tsab activity forced them to drop the option.
• Divided We Fall: Uniting humanity against the common threat is one thing; getting them to agree on HOW to fight said common threat can be problematic.
• Dream Land: In Vanilla CT it was eaten. In ANE it stays that way, except that it still exists. How? Well, it's still getting digested.
• Driven to Suicide: Fights between Evas and Heralds seems to cause continent-wide Aeon War Syndrome with more sensitive people, with messy suicides being one of the more common results.
• Easy Logistics: Averted. Weapons run out of coolant, even with nanofactories the NEG armed forces have to fight over who gets to use the ones large enough to make capital grade equipment, and let's not even get started on the lengths that the Esoteric Order of Dagon has to go to keep old-fashioned industry (as NEG and Migou nanophages make operating nanofactories without the proper counter agents almost impossible) running.
• Eldritch Abomination: Where to start? With the Heralds, which are the Angels but even more Lovecraftian? With the fungoid insects of the Migou? With the Deep Ones? With Rei, and the rest of Project Herkunft? Earth Scorpion himself?
• EMP: Emfog and other similar stuff.
• Empathic Weapon: Both the Evangelions, and their "spin-off" lesser siblings, the Engels. Interestingly, in Chapter 13, the Engels are shown to be smarter than the Evangelions, and actually able to sort of communicate back.
• The Empire: Subverted: ANE!Migou is not so much an empire as much as it's a loose network based on the philosophy of making sure that hidden, sealed, and dangerous things stay hidden and sealed. It's also stated that "Migou" is a collective term for member races of the Network instead of the name of one race.
• Enemy Mine: Mild version - The Migou withdrew some of their forces so that NEG could use the now-freed-up forces on the Herald. The NEG isn't returning the favour for Moloch, the reskinned Sandalphon.
• Epiphanic Prison: Shinji is trying to keep himself sane during the nightmares by applying this belief.
• Evil Albino: Well, we don't know about "evil" exactly (and technically sidoci aren't albinos), but Rei's certainly not normal. Also, we've caught a glimpse of an inactive Kaworu, along with mentions of a synchronicity incident. Since this is a FEAR crossover, that can't be good.
• Expospeak and Info Dump: Well done actually.
• Eye Scream: An Engel pilot's wife clawed her eyes out as a result of Herald-generated Aeon War Syndrome.
• Foreshadowing: All the time. At some points, it seems that dropping plot hints is something the author is actually addicted to.
• Formulaic Magic: The Salaamian school of sorcery is related, conceptually, to the mathematics used in Dreams in the Witch House.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: By rendering mind shattering abominations to look like something from the century-old anime. (They are still mind shattering...)
• Fictional Video Game: Doctrine of Eternal Aeons III.
• Functional Magic: Takes the Cthulhu Tech sorcery and splits it into major schools: Cassandran, Horakian, Lorenzian and Salaamian, although the last one barely qualifies as major not that it stopped Special Services from using it in summoning the Herald.
• Fun with Acronyms: Misato typed out a report on Eva's new gear and other stuff for Ritsuko, who didn't bother to read it, and she named it ROE.
• Fusion Fic: Both Evangelion and FEAR have been blended almost seamlessly into the greater Cthulhu Tech universe. Not that this was necessarily that hard for Evangelion, of course, but still...
  • Nanoha has also been included, properly Lovecraftianized. And there are enough Shout-Out references to Revelation Space that it can probably be called a component. Of course, that didn't need to be altered much to fit in.
• Gambit Roulette: Gendo and Fuyutsuki admit that this is what their plans amount to, since certain eldritch abominations can screw over them without trying. Or in author's words:

Earth Scorpion: I'm not gonna spoil anything by saying that one of the possible reasons why something didn't go as planned is simply the result of Nyarlathotep being a dick.

• Gatling Good: The Plasma Minigun.
• Genius Bonus: If you're smart enough. If not, then it's Fridge Brilliance after checking the net.
• Gratuitous German: Used throughout (and fairly accurately), both in the names of the Ashcroft Projects and Groups and in the occasional section of untranslated German poetry, as well as Asuka getting angry.
• Going for the Big Scoop: Your standard battlefield reporters, except with more common sense and less desire to dig up conspiracies, since humanity already has enough enemies in this War.
• Good Is Dumb: How everybody else views humanity, particularly the Migou. Apart from the fact that they don't think of humanity as good.
• Good News, Bad News: The whole Moloch disaster aside, at least they got Dagon.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: This is Mythos-based, after all. There's also a bit of a running gag in the comments about the readers going mad every time Earth Scorpion throws us another piece of the puzzle.
• Hailfire Peaks: Iceland. Truth in Television here; it really does have glaciers in close proximity to active volcanoes. Although somewhat less Fish People, Starfish Aliens, and Eldritch Abominations. Probably.
• Hermetic Magic: Your standard Arcane Magic from Cthulhu Tech. ANE got one notable example with the special ship equipped with lots of very accurate lasers carving out the summoning runes on the side of the mountain.
• He Who Fights Monsters: This basically happened to most of the high-ranking members of the NEG a long time ago. Perhaps the best example of this is Colonel Rury of the Special Weapons Division, who, as a Nazzadi (a cloned, genetically altered human subspecies designed by the Migou to wipe out humanity, who rebelled) has overseen the creation of the Replicas, cloned, genetically-altered (in some way, we're not exactly sure what went into them), human-based constructs designed to wipe out anything which opposes the NEG, and who can't even conceive of the possibility of rebellion. Yes, in some ways, we're already better monsters than the monsters (also see: the NEG assault on Iceland, and the Replica Elite against Loyalist Nazzadi).
• High Altitude Battle: See the It's Raining Men entry below.
• Hive Mind: Played with for the Migou. Despite their insectoid appearance, they're not a hive minded species naturally. However, quite apart from their cyberdemocratic social structure, with individuals linked into data networks all the time, they also have a way of splitting their souls between multiple bodies, creating a sort of limited hive-mind, where every [body-form/individual] in the network is them.
• Hold the Line: The Evangelions and what other forces that could be spared trying to keep the Migou away from Moloch until they could capture the Herald.
• Hope Spot: After the initial bombings, Iceland's defenders spot three titanic figures rising from the deep, mistaking them for Dagon's eldest children, then mistaking them for Cthulhu's with the rise of religious zeal. And then one of the titans starts to burn everything in its way.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: Alma Wade is implied to be humanitiy's own Old One. Dagon's ignorance of this trope is why he initally thinks Paxton Fettel has to be a son of Yog-Sothoth, even when the invocation dosen't work.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: It's been hinted that the area within an AT-Field is a separate universe, where the universal constants...aren't.
• Humanoid Abomination: There are lots of human-looking things, which are just vaguely off. Of course, if they look like a human, they're probably an artificial being...or Nyarlathotep. And then there's Alma.
  • And then there's Replica sub-commander Orpheus, a... thing that sucks the memories (or soul?) from the Nazzadi loyalist squad leader.
• All Human Sub-Species Are Bastards: Well...yes. The state vivisects people suspected of involvement in cults and puts them through intrusive neural response mapping (it does repair them if they're found innocent, but come on). The Ashcroft Foundation has the Projects and the Groups, which involve things like the Evangelion Group (sticking teenagers in arcanocyberxenobiological monstrosities and using them as soldiers) and the Herkunft Group.
  • In the words of the author, "Nazzadi are just human, which is to say, they're bastard-covered bastards with a bastard topping and a squishy bastard core." I think that's fairly clear.
• Humans Are Special: Brutally, brutally subverted. We're an species descended from out-of-control Elder Thing hypertech on a world which is important because it's claimed by much more powerful species than us, and we're the idiots mucking around with technology we don't understand.
  • In a way, though, we are special. We live on Cthulhu's planet. That's not the kind of special you really want to be, though.
    • We also created our own Old One. Oh Crap.
• I Have Many Names: Comes with the Mythos. Nyarlathotep gets a new one in this fic: More Of A Dick Than Gendo. Also true for Rei (Rei Ayanami, the First Child, the Third Infant, Invidia).
• Invisibility: Besides the standard mecha-exlusive cloaking devices from canon Cthulhu Tech, the Replica Assassins have personal cloaking devices, which in this setting is considered revolutionary.
• Incredibly Lame Pun: The high-power charge beam often carried by Unit 00 is quickly dubbed the "Rei Gun", despite the fact that (as Rei points out) it's not actually a ray gun at all.
• In Medias Res: The beginning of Operation CATO from the cultist's point of view. The next chapter takes us back three days to the NEG staging phase of CATO.
• Insignificant Little Blue Planet: But of course. Somewhat played straight by humanity themselves, who consider the total ecological annihilation of everything besides humanity as acceptable sacrifice, as long as they get to survive.
• Instant Armor: The Star Spawn High Priest's "Barrier Jacket".
• Invisible Anatomy: Sub-Commander Orpheus looks like a halfway decomposed corpse that shouldn't be standing at all. Justified that it's a psy-projection, and he probably is like that in his life-support coffin.
• I Sense a Disturbance In The Force: Heralds seems to give this, particularly in form of Aeon War Syndrome.
• It Got Worse: Operation CATO not going exactly as planned? Fishmen using nukes? Migou responding to all that? The summoning of the Herald gone wrong? Pray that the author won't make the Rapine Storm appear out of nowhere, despite being at least a whole continent away from Iceland.
  • Chapter 15b ends with this line:

And then it got worse.

• • • Considering the ending, there's not many ways it could've possibly gotten worse.
• It's Raining Men: Several companies of special forces Power Armor and one Unit 02, being dropped from high in the atmosphere, to conduct a mid-air boarding of Migou Swarm Ships. It works. Less fun when the Migou pull the same on Operation CATO.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: ...with just about the right ratio of answers to new questions.
  • Note that unlike the fic's source material, the picture the pieces make when put together actually makes sense...in a very horrifying, Lovecraftian sort of way, appropriately enough.
  • Note also that even knowing what the hell was going on in Evangelion won't help you much here.
• Kansas City Shuffle: The whole Operation CATO is nothing but the cover for the Herald capturing.
• Kill'Em All: Rei wakes up Alma during the battle against Moloch. EVERYBODY DIES. Nyarlathotep is bored. Bad End....at least until the rewrite.
• Killer Game Master: Word of God states that he partially writes this fic as a imaginary RPG session, and considering what happens in the fic itself, it fits (Especially the Rocks Fall Everybody Dies style ending).
• Kill Sat: Implied with GODSPEAR.
• Knight Templar: A Cultist during the Operation CATO is left in charge (after killing the competition) of the one the survivor groups, and to ensure that they will live to fight another day, she places the most weakest of the group, the children, as a rear guard and the vanguard. For some reason, she reminds people of Rossiu, although Word of God says that it was unintentional.
• Lampshade Hanging: Really quite common, in the form of:
• Lemony Narrator
• Little Hero, Big War: The Aeon War is large enough that even the Evangelions are dwarfed beside it. And then you occasionally meet the little guys, like the lone FSB agents who had the OIS barge into their investigation, who really have no clue what is going on, plot-wise.
  • Rather like the readers, of course.
    • The clues are all there, and they cannot be unread...
• Loads and Loads of Characters: As part of the Little Hero, Big War and Jigsaw Puzzle Plot, there are occasionally sections looking at what other people in universe, who don't appear to be linked to the main plot, are doing. Some of them even survive, and tend to reappear.
• Macross Missile Massacre: As a part of Cthulhu Tech's Macross legacy, everybody got the multi-missile launchers. Chapter 15b crowned the Migou as kings of this trope with their ridiculously advanced hive mind-like storms upon storms of missiles.
• Mad Scientist: There are a lot of sanity-challenged scientists in this fic. The Evangelion ones, the Engel ones, the Herkunft ones, and when the author gets around to explaining exactly what Projects Achtzig and Amunet actually are, I'm sure they'll be somewhat insane, too.
  • Megalomania is a form of insanity, yes...
• Magical Thinking Versus Scientific Thinking: Although, as a Mythos story, there's no real difference between the two (except in the way that humans can't understand the arcane properly), there's pretty resounding triumph for the scientific method, all in all. That's one of the big reasons the Deep Ones are in the trouble they are in; both the Migou and the NEG are just a lot better at making use of things. Not to mention the fact that sorcery has become a science, and a lot of the scientists in the story, at the very least, also dabble in sorcery. That's not even to mention the OSS sorcerers (complete with cyberbrains), who work with a form which involves performing the hyper-dimensional complex equations involved in sorcery from first principles, rather than just relying upon the classically-used rules of thumb, allowing much more precision in their effects.
• Magitek: As noted in the Cthulhu Tech article, magic is merely a kind of science not understood by people yet. The D-Engine is a classic kind of Magitek, though, with its flagrant disregard for thermodynamics. And then there's the use of cyberbrains to link sorcerers together inside someone's soul and make sorcerous rituals faster to cast. That is, rituals where the arcane symbols are carved into a mountain using a giant laser mounted on a flying battlecruiser, because getting a sculptor is too slow.
• Me's a Crowd: The Migou Soldiers of Necessary Actions as seen in Iceland are the soul splitting variant. See also Hive Mind.
• Meaningful Name: Very fond of this. There's Project Daeva, this story's version of Jet Alone. The Heralds are named for Canaanite deities. There are both the Infants and the Children, who appear to have some degree of overlap. There are all the Ashcroft Foundation Projects, and the codenames for the Project Paragon subjects.
• Mecha Expansion Pack: Most of the new toys of the Mid-Season Upgrade are this.
• Medium Awareness: According to a code-OMAKE event, Rei is aware of everything in the story that the author has planned. This might actually not be a joke.
• Mega Crossover: It hits the required minimum number for the "Mega" label when the FEAR elements start working their way in. There may be yet more connections; many (though not all) of the Shout Outs turn out to be plot-relevant in some way. Most notably, the FEAR elements started as simple Shout Outs, but slowly started making their way into the main story. The Lovecraftianized Nanoha elements look to be heading in the same direction.
• Melee a Trois: Chapter 14 has set this up. Oh, yes. Then Chapter 15b sets up a different one.
• Mercy Kill: The 8 year old cultist girl mentioned in the Creepy Child entry above tries to do this for her dying little sister, fails and breaks down in tears.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: ...or a late So Last Season considering that they are still on early Heralds, but the Evas had their conventional D-Engines replaced with the engines that powered Project Daeva, which gives them a LOT MORE power output without tearing reality to pieces (as much), and that's not counting the new hardware. Even Rei was somewhat impressed.
• Minovsky Physics: Arcanotech in general and some of the magic and para-psychics fit this trope.
• Mind Over Manners: Imported from Cthulhu Tech. Played with during the NERO briefing, where Rei describes Misato's unstable emotional state, after which Misato calms down and then gets angry and tells Rei to stop probing her head, after which Rei explains that she has no mind-reading powers (as far as we know) and being a sensory type, she is just good at analyzing.
• Mind Rape: Paxton Fettel does that to Dagon. Oh, yes. Everyone loves Eldritch Abomination Mind Rape.
• Mind Screw: The effect at just looking at some extra-normal things, the dreams, Alma, oh gods, Alma...uh, basically, the story is sort of made of this trope.
  • Also, it's widely agreed to be the effect of reading too much Aeon Natum Engel in one sitting, and may cause manic laughter, over-analysis of patterns, and starting to think like EarthScorpion.
• Missing Mom: Oh boy, yes. Hikary notes that there are fairly high fatality/incapacity rates among Ashcroft researchers, and a lot of people have lost parents. And we know what that means. Meanwhile, Yui is not only missing from life, but there isn't even a single picture anywhere on the metanet, which is really suspicious, according to Asuka.
• Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: A definite 2 -- there's plenty of physics-breaking to go around, but it's all explained and internally consistent. Like most good 2s on the scale, it reads as if it were far harder than it actually is.
• Most Writers Are Human: Averted. There's a slightly disturbing tendency to get behind the mindset of inhuman beings, to the extent that the third person narration style changes in those sections, to match the propoganda and way that those things think.
  • Of course, that raises the question of whether the main narration is actually accurate.
    • Of course not: That is WHY humans go insane when facing the Eldritch, our reality schema is inherently inaccurate.
• Mugging the Monster: Some punks (described in the cast list as "the three morons") tried to mug a Dhohanoid pair in interlude 2. The results are predictable.
• My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: Or more accurately, sucked out.
• Mythology Gag: Many, with the Operation CATO being a very ironic re-telling of the JSSDF assault on the Geofront during End of Evangelion.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Destroying two reality-breaking energy sources close to each other is a bad idea as the newly created Zone after the Twin-Herald fight will show you.
• Never the Selves Shall Meet: The recent omake's footnotes (yes, footnotes) shows why.
• Nightmare Sequence: Both Shinji and the Dagonite cultist from the Villain Episode have had these. They're probably some kind of Foreshadowing, especially the cultist's dream.
• Nuke'Em: Suggested by both NEG High Command and Migou [meeting/assembly] as a response to the deteriorating situation in Iceland, but fortunately postponed. The Order, on the other hand...
• Numbered Homeworld: The Migou classification for the Sol system is Ƕǡ ѬѮӜ-[(zero-46,656) and (thirtyone-1296) and (eleven-36) and (thirtyfive)]-[(zero-60,466,176) and (one-1,679,616) and (twentynine-46,656) and (seven-1296) and (seventeen-36) and (three)].
  • For those without sufficient spare time to convert that into human-readable form, that works out to Ƕǡ ѬѮӜ-VBZ-T 7 H 3 in base 36, or Ƕǡ ѬѮӜ-40607-1362711 in decimal. Your call on whether it means anything.
• Old Shame: The initial chapters which, in the word of Earth Scorpion, are littered with aborted fetuses of dead plot arcs, amongst other things. One of the reasons of the Bad End and the new rewrite.
• Omake: Now comes complete with a separate selection of non-canon Code OMAKE situations, including two (at current date) examinations of what would happen if the Aeon Natum Engel characters met their Nobody Dies counterparts. There is Rei-based Temperment Whiplash.
• One Steve Limit: Averted. There's Hikary Horaki, the amlati Class Representative, and Hikary, the Weny Komdy of the Loyalist power armor squad. There's also the Horakian school of sorcery, which Earth Scorpion has said not named after Hikary Horaki's maternal family...and then there's "Orpheus," the codename for one of the Eva-candidates Hikary Horaki again! (probably) and Sub-Commander Orpheus...at least we all hope they are not the same character.
• Our Gods Are Greater: The Heralds.
• Out of Focus: In the Little Hero, Big War kind of way, the Eva pilots get a little focus during Operation CATO compared to everything else. They seem to get a little more focus back in chapter15b.
• Overused Running Gag: In-universe Misato certainly thinks so about the Special Services' non-existence.
• Painting the Medium: Certain things are always represented in italics, like foreign (or made up) languages. The Heralds' thoughts were each represented differently, and occasionally the alignment of the text shifts.
• Post Cyber Punk: The arcologies, and the New Earth Government in general. Notably getting more so in more recent chapters, especially as the Achtzig Group comes more into play.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: The Patrone system is implied to be an example of this; what is about a head taller than a man's torso, and a little wider?
• Psychic Powers: ANE takes it up a notch and basically makes it a twisted reflection of arcane magic.
• Punctuation Shaker: All the time when the Order is involved. Justified in that it is noted that humans really can't speak it properly, and then lampshaded when a Star Spawn notes to itself that the Deep Ones can't, either.
• Purple Prose: Avoids the usual shortcomings associated with this style. Most of the time.
• Race Lift: Several characters (Toji, Hikari, Makoto, Rei, Asuka?) are changed to Nazzadi or xenomixes (human-Nazzadi crosses, as they're sub-species and so can cross-breed). Rei is a sidoci.
• Red Herring: Word of God says that something that everyone expects to happen will turn out to be like this.
• Real Robot: The non-Evangelion mecha are like this, and even the Evas, when AT-Fields aren't involved, are closer to this than normal.
• Reality Warper: The AT-Fields, and anything with the ability to produce one.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The Heralds are named after Canaanite deities and also the usual fluff from other series.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Averted, actually. It's rather well edited, with only a slight tendency to excess verbosity, especially when he's expositioning.
• Running Gag: Meta-examples with the already mentioned readers going mad from connecting parts of the puzzle and assuming that everyone whose name starts with Nya is a aspect of Nyarlathotep...
  • Special Services doesn't exist.
• Sadly Mythtaken: Gendo comments on the widespread belief that Necronomicom will drive you insane by simply reading it. Thought he does states that re-reading certain accurate parts after similar events happened in reality will do this.
• Schrödinger's Gun
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Duh. It's also the whole reason why everybody wants to take over Iceland. Hell, the reason Iceland itself exists is because of the said can.
• Separate but Identical: The similarities between human and Nazzadi is even more evident in here than in Cthulhu Tech. Besides better agility and nightvision, their different appearance and preference for racial mecha, Nazzadi can be practically identical to humans, especially the younger generation. Compare that to Canon better than you Nazzadi from Mortal Remains.
• Scale of Scientific Sins: 1 is banned; 2 is what started this whole mess; 3 and 5 resulted in Nazzadi and Project Herkunft and "officially" banned for same reasons as 1; 4, 6 and 7 will have to wait until the rewrite...and even then there's no guarantee that they'll show up.
• Screw Yourself: Genderbending magic allows homosexual couples to have children. Unfortunately, people being people, of course someone decided to impregnate themselves using sperm produced when they were male, then transitioning to/back to female. In-universe this is known as Egocest, and often leaves the child with a bunch of nasty recessive conditions. The YY combination doesn't work, as it's noted that a quarter of originally-male pregnancies are non-viable.
• Shout-Out: Quite a few of these.
• Shown Their Work
• Show Within a Show
• Shrouded in Myth: OSS expected Moloch to be slightly larger than the Evas instead of a kilometers-long monstrosity.
• Sinister Silhouettes: Pulled of by the EVAs at the start of Operation CATO.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: So cynical it gets a bit caustic at times. There's even a thinly veiled author digression in Chapter 9 against the idea that TTGL-style tactics could ever work.
  • Confirmed by Word of God. Apparently, Earth Scorpion is one of those strange people in the "Rossiu was Right" camp.
    • And to hammer it home, during Operation CATO some cultists with some very familiar names and personalities are gunned down by Foxtrot 813.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness: Very serious.
• Sliding Scale of Villain Effectiveness: The Order and the Rapine Storm, while dangerous, are contained. The Migou however can curbstomp both NEG and the Cults, but are too afraid to wake up the [{HAZARDS}/{THREATS}] if they use their full military potential.
• Sliding Scale of Villain Threat: As far as humans concerned, every other side is a global-level threat. Subverted with Migou, who are actually an alliance against Universal and higher-level threats.
• Sophisticated As Hell
• State Sec: Earth Scorpion's interpretation of Cthulhu Tech State Sec in the Core and Vade Mecum basically makes them a something that not even Solid Snake will sneak by, also making it impossible for the Damnation View's "Everything is Falling Apart" scenario to happen.
• Strong Family Resemblance: According to Dr Miyakame, Asuka looks and sounds enough like her mother that, from behind, he mistook them, which was a bit of a shock for him.
  • Oh, obviously, there's still the Shinji-Gendo similarity, which gets lampshaded whenever Shinji raises an eyebrow or interlocks his fingers (normally with comments along the lines of "Don't do that. It looks odd.").
• Subbing Versus Dubbing: Ken rants about the inferiority of the both Post-Reform and Pre-Reform official English dubs & subs compared to the original Japanese and how they screwed things up. This is how he recongnizes the Japanese Shinji was mumbling, by the way.
• Super Prototype: Evas to Engels, although less supery than most examples.
• Superweapon Surprise: Fishmen got nukes.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: This trope certainly does not apply to anything to do with Special Services.

Special Services did not exist. It was not the penultimate branch of NEG authority, a black-books agency which was assigned to threats of a cosmic and/or metaphysical level. Their field agents were not almost, to a man, sorcerers and parapsychics, and they were not expressly given permission to ignore the NEG laws on summoning and binding extra-normal entities, consorting with Outsiders, use of parapsychic abilities on innocents, and registering their powers. They were not granted latitude to break the laws that even the OIS had to follow. The agency did not largely recruit from individuals arrested by the OIS, from among those who dabbled in the otherworldly and managed to remain both human and sane, and certainly did not subject them to extensive neuromodification, genetherapy and other illegal techniques developed in collaboration with top-secret Ashcroft Groups to ensure that they were both loyal and the best that they could be.


After all, Special Services did not exist.


They were, however, The Men in Black who conspiracy theorists whispered about and cultists dreaded.

• Take That: Interlude 2 consists largely of mockery of the...sillier parts of the extended Cthulhu Mythos, especially Brian Lumley, although the author has also made his disdain for August Derleth clear.
  • When Shinji watches TV, it's clear that the author does not like sensationalist talk shows.
• Techno-Magibabble
• Technology Porn
• Tell Me About My Mother: They didn't specifically ask, but Dr. Mikayame (the guy who created the Engels) starts to rant about Yui and Kyoko after mistaking both Shinji and Asuka for them.
• Tempting Fate - "The possibility of a resonance cascade scenario is extremely unlikely!"
• There Are No Therapists: Averted, thanks to the story's Cthulhu Tech heritage. The Children are actually subjected to mandatory counseling, to prevent them from going crazy. It's working as well as can be expected given the setting (i.e., not very).
• This Is Not a Drill
• Translation Convention: This happens when somebody reads something (like Rei's "notes") since the Author established that his settings uses reformed English as the main language, which in simple terms is a fully phonetic version of our modern English. The main reason for reformation is to reduce the numbers of screwups in increasingly common arcane rituals (and to avoid cleaning the mess because of some very minor misspelling during the ritual).
  • And the Migou [meeting/assembly]. Still hard to understand, though.
    • Averted in several other scenes, most notably the Nazzadi Loyalists, who appear to use an entirely fictional, internally consistent language.
• Understatement: Quite common considering the writing style. Here's an example from recent chapter:

Things were a little less confident in Nero Command.

• Unperson: Yui-sama, as usual. Asuka is having trouble believing that Shinji couldn't find anything about her on the net.
• Unusual User Interface: Maya and other Magi operators take a page from Ghost in the Shell with very thinly disguised cyberbrains. And then there are the Special Services cybersorcerers, who take a leaf from the Conjoiner's book.
  • There's also both the Evangelions and the Engels; the latter are controlled with implants that link your nervous system up to the thing underneath the armor.
• Urban Warfare: As shown in battles in former-Reykjavik.
• Viewers Are Geniuses: In-universe Shinji comments that one of the TV shows is one giant pile of this. You almost have to be to get some of the references, and then there's all the untranslated German...
• Villain Decay: While still dangerous, The Order and the Rapine Storm are a lesser threat due to being outnumbered compared to everyone else for the former and being no longer underestimated and contained for the latter in this fic compared to the Vanilla Cthulhu Tech.
• Villain Episode: The normal life of the Dagonite society in the Order-controled Iceland, until they get bombed with chemical, biological, micrological and nanological weapons, assaulted by Replica soldiers, and finally, have the Evas emerge from the deep to turn this day in the limelight into the day in the man-made Novas.
• The War Sequence: Operation CATO.
• War Is Hell: This sequence during operation CATO spells just how.

"It's a five-four-fifty-five. That means that some of the captives have had slow-release drugs that induce symptoms akin to paranoid schizophrenia injected before we got to them, and had non-metallic knives hidden on them. They're normally fully symptomatic before they find the knives, if they do at all. Sometimes they just attack the others with their bare hands and teeth."


He glared at them.


"Do you know what it's like working in an environment where it's so common that we have a standardised code for it?"

• Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Anti-Order Kraken device, which will result in very messy ecological disaster if used. Thankfully, its use was denied...or postponed.
• We Have Reserves: Subverted for Migou. Those "reserves" are extra bodies that one individual Migou soldier can occupy with the soul splitting process.
• Weirdness Magnet: The intelligence community think that Evas are this to the Heralds, or that someone is arranging for them to be at the right place at the right time.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Every side view themselves like this.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: So, exactly, how are the vat-grown, weaponised, genetically-altered first generation Nazzadi different from the vat-grown, weaponised, genetically-altered Replica troops? Well, apart from the fact that the Replicas are soulless.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Our heroes got some criticism for contaminating Lake Michigan with Shoggoth-like substances. Considering the Insignificant Little Blue Planet example above, it's more likely has to do with the lake being right next to the capital of the NEG than about ecological reasons.
• White-Haired Pretty Girl: All Whites are like this. In-universe, Rei is certainly admired from a distance, when people aren't getting cold shivers and having to break her glance.
• The Woobie: By Word of God, the local genocidal Starfish Aliens, the Migou, are his personal woobies.
• X Meets Y: It's sort of a bit like HP Lovecraft, Alastair Reynolds, and Stephen Baxter got drunk together and watched all of Neon Genesis Evangelion in one sitting, had an epic session of Cthulhu Tech (no mortal remains) and played the whole F.E.A.R. series (no vivendi expansions), then plotted out the setting.
• Xenofiction
• You Are Not Ready: ANE!Migou's true purpose of invasion (Stop playing with toys that will wake up the Old Ones you hairless apes!) compared to Canon!Migou (who see humanity as a threat to their interests).
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Comes with the settings. Subverted with Rei, who deals with this, as seen in the twin Herald aftermath, by simply not even trying (down to the instinctual level) to understand it.
• You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Averted. This setting's Rei uses the more realistic (and offically sactioned) white hair. Likewise, Earth Scorpion accepts that Misato's is a stylised black and writes it as such. There are photoshopped images of Rei (or as she gets called, Creepy!Rei); the term "creepy" is very much correct.

How Boring.

—Nyarlathotep, The former CEO of the Chrysalis Corporation, the Soul of the Outer Gods, the Crawling Chaos, the Great Beast, Lord Entropy, the End of All Things, Master of Cessation, King of Oblivion, More Of A Dick Than Gendo, the Watcher in the Dark (Whatever the fuck he feels like).