Be prepared

Chapter 2: Twelve years and a slave

Chapter 2: Twelve years and a slave.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." – Declaration of independence abolishing slavery.

Lesson time. The dullest and least exciting part of the day and while Shinji was very much aware that this was a shared opinion among many, the fact he as an Eva Pilot would most likely have no use for any of the useless skills being droned out in a nasal monotone made that fact even more painful.

It would be laughable to think that the day would come when the world would reach a state where he and his fellow pilots could set foot in an honest business as normal people going about a normal day using their academic skills rather than their crazy skills to make an honest living.

With how close a shave the last attack had been for him, he was sure that he'd been eaten alive first.
To Shinji if no one else, School was little more than a glorified slave pen.
A slave pen designed to keep him shackled firmly to the system while his uncaring and oversighted father spent his days as the "big man" chilling up in that fancy suite he had all to himself and which Shinji was strictly forbidden to venture into at any time except when ordered to.

No long ass lectures for that lucky bastard.
No massive load of assessments to worry or thick stacks of essays to work through or big books of questions the lazy teacher had never even properly explained in class to anyone.

It was all smooth sailing in his luxurious office in that big comfortable leather armchair while his son spent his days slumped forward onto the desk in this cold classroom which had turned down its heating to save on electricity bill due to the extraordinary tributes NERV demanded as protection fees.

And unbeknownst to even Shinji as the son of NERV's chief at this present moment, this fee of unbelievable size applied not just to everyone in Tokyo-3, not just to those living in Japan but to people from virtually all corners of the world.

Sweatshop workers who had worked their backs off harvesting crop in exchange for the meagre pile of coin that would earn their daily bread, cleaners who were unable to have serious respiratory illnesses treated from years of spraying cleaning fluid onto thick and dusty grime and even
families who had nothing of value left but their children in lands where the slave trade was not only legal but a blooming black market of unforetold fortune for its higher ups.

Not one of them was exempt.

The fee of NERV that the completely oblivious Shinji would only discover later to an unfathomable magnitude of shock and terror, better known as the doomsday tax in reference to a historical phenomenon of the doomsday book kept by a certain King William the conqueror.

And at that very moment as the lesson dragged on and on with information Shinji knew he would never need, a dark haired woman dressed head to toe in rags in a middle Eastern insect infested slum screamed her heart out as her daughter was whipped into submission before being clapped in chains by a tall and immaculate moustached merchant with a grin that would drive the Cheshire cat to fits of envy.

The gems on his velvet robes sparkled in the morning sun as he handed the shivering girl to another equally smart man who lifted her with one rough gesture into the boot of a large gas guzzling truck already packed full of chained up and frowning children of all kinds of appearances and locked the doors not even giving the girl the chance to glance even once more at her now hysterical mother.

Perhaps that was for the best as the frightened girl's expression would have been one of fear and hopelessness in its most dreadful form. As young and naïve as she was, she had not been deaf to the stories that spoke of the accursed fates of children who ended their lives in the god forsaken place known only to most as "the slave pens".