Be prepared

Chapter 1: The poorest boy in Tokyo

Be Prepared.

Chapter 1: The poorest boy in Tokyo

So be prepared for the chance of a lifetime.
Be prepared, for SENSATIONAL news
A shining new era, is tiptoeing nearer.

"Hah, I wish" the brown-haired boy still in his bed muttered sadly under his breath as the uplifting tones of a very talented singer rang out from the old and grey metal device that was his music player and one source of solace in his melancholic, lonely days.

It said something when a mess of buttons and switches attached to a heavy cube with a speaker and disk slot which he had picked up at a car-boots sale with his meagre savings, seemed closer to being a friend than the flesh and blood "colleagues" he, first child and pilot Shinji Ikari was forced to be in constant contact with.

He used the word colleagues in a very loose sense of the word as some of the actions he was sometimes forced to endure made the word "tormentors" much more fitting.

A very strong word, he knew, but perhaps the only one that could appropriately describe the people around him for what he could not help but see them for despite his best efforts to remain optimistic in his circumstances.

And where do we feature?
Just listen to teacher.

"If I do that then what do we need the angels for? I'll be bored to death before I even get to the battlefield. At least being ripped apart by an Angel would be quick..."

Not that being tortured and eventually killed slowly and painfully by one of those wretched abominations was a fate Shinji would have wished upon anyone.

But it certainly beat having to stand in front of his ungrateful superiors and listening to them rant on and on about how he was stupid, worthless and not worth the space he took up on earth despite all that he had accomplished.

Being a pilot for Mankind's most deadly technological terror was already no cakewalk, but the various other shenanigans Shinji had to deal with between each horrific fight somehow managed to take things from bad to unbearable.

His roommate who called him "stupid Shinji" threw every single chore in the apartment in his direction as hard as was humanly possible.
These "chores" included Cleaning the entire apartment so that if there was even a speck of dust left anywhere, he had failed.

Cooking food for three, one of them a very picky eater who made those whiny baby Princesses from poorly made low-budget kids cartoons seem like beautifully behaved saints in comparison.

And rushing out in the dead of night praying to find at least one open store correctly stocked when a certain German redhead decided it would be a good time for some reason ,for an evening snack consisting of luxury food specifically in the style of her people.

She repaid the diligent male housekeeper's efforts in a very physical manner.

A manner which left an already wounded war veteran with yet another impressive set of bruises and cuts to add to his already towering stack of injuries.

Angels were fearsome creatures yet even they seemed to pale in comparison to the explosive hair-trigger temper of his roommate and fellow pilot Asuka.
If only Shinji were a masochist, he'd be on the highest cloud of seven heaven living with such a roommate.

And as much as Shinji wished that were the case, it tragically was not.

And that wasn't even getting started on the long winded rants he still had to endure in that building designed for "learning" and "education" but where the one thing he learned was that most educators these days would regurgitate anything endlessly on repeat if they were given the price of two beers.