Aeon Entelechy Evangelion



""It is time."

"Yes. It is time for Entelechy to begin.""

- Aeon Entelechy Evangelion, Prologue: The Words That Began The End of Everything.

Take the Cthulhu Mythos, as seen through the futuristic, Hopeless War lens of Cthulhu Tech. Add in the supernatural horror of the First Encounter Assault Recon series, as well as various bits and pieces (most of them nasty) from Eclipse Phase and Revelation Space. Now throw them all into a blender, and use the resulting nightmare of a setting to tell the already dark and apocalyptic story of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

This is Aeon Entelechy Evangelion. And odds are, it's not going to end well.

Twenty Minutes Into the Future, mankind stumbles across knowledge of the Mythos, as the flaws in the old scientific models become evident. The scientific method is promptly applied, and things turn out pretty well, with sorcery-as-a-science and reactionless engines transforming all aspects of our culture. Sounds nice?

It Got Worse.

It is now 2091. Space is controlled by the Migou, who are trying to stomp mankind back into the Stone Age without waking up anything else that lives on Earth. The Esoteric Order of Dagon are trying to wake Cthulhu. A large percentage of Asia has become weirdly merged with Leng, where the Dead God, Hastur, resides, and there is a subtle war going between two sides of Humanoid Abominations and one side of Complete Monsters inside the territory controlled by the New Earth Government.

But, don't worry! Gendo Ikari, a senior figure in the Ashcroft Foundation (the world's largest Mega Corp) will save us from the monstrous, god-like threats called Harbingers (named after Canaanite deities) which are attacking on top of all of this. Apparently, he has some kind of secret weapon.

This can only have a happy ending.

Aeon Entelechy Evangelion is a 2nd edition/sequel/rewrite of Earth Scorpion's Aeon Natum Engel because ES ran out of ink... er, felt dissatisfied with the inconsistencies between the earlier and later chapters. As of February 23, 2012, a prologue and eighteen chapters have been published, currently in Book II. Naturally, so far it has turned out just as terrifying as Aeon Natum Engel.

If not worse.

It has a Character Page that currently lists the differences between Canon EVA and AEE characters. It also has a Shout Out page.

=== See Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cthulhu Tech, FEAR, Revelation Space and Eclipse Phase for other tropes which might appear. Specific tropes found in Aeon Entelechy Evangelion: ===

"Earth Scorpion: Seriously. Sachiel is up there with Ramiel and Zeruel for destructive power. It's just that because it's the first to appear, that it tends to go down like a bitch in fanfics."
 * Abandoned Playground: There is a small patch of grass, with a swing hanging from the tree in the middle of it, in the middle of the abandoned arcology dome that Rei lives in. Notably, Shinji is Genre Savvy enough that he finds it creepy. Note that That can't be a coincidence....
 * Accidental Hero: Toja became one when he tried to find a missing Ill Girl during an evacuation of her school. A whole class of 10-year old girls ended up idolizing him for that.
 * Achilles Heel: The joints of anyone with subdermal armor (which would necessarily include heels), whether NEG or Migou in origin, are less armored. Justified in that it is still necessary to move the joint, so of course they have to have less armor there, and it's still possible to kill them without hitting the weaker spot.
 * The Aesthetics of Technology: New Earth Government designs are utilitarian and precisely designed for optimal performance, regardless of aesthetics; Migou designs are noted as "approaching techno-organic from the far side", in that they're machinery which looks organic, rather than lifeforms replacing technology.
 * Afraid of Needles:
 * Xuan Do doesn't like needles, at least when they are used on her.
 * Toja's very uncomfortable when Imi gives herself an injection.
 * Alien Blood:
 * Possessed by aliens, perhaps unsurprisingly.
 * Averted with both the Nazzadi and the Deep Ones, as the former are basically just human, and the latter are still terrestrial creatures that use hemoglobin.
 * Alien Geometries: Everything related to the Harbingers, and especially so now that Mot showed up; think Rebuild 's version of Ramiel, only as a multi-dimensional combined fractal/polyhedron. Aeon War Syndrome, where the mind breaks trying to comprehend the seemingly impossible geometries, is a constant threat.
 * Alien Kudzu: The Leng ecosystem is a combination of this and an alternative set of laws of physics; the change to physical laws spreads in areas where it is permitted to grow, and it grows in areas where the laws of physics are different enough that it can survive.
 * Alike and Antithetical Adversaries: The non-human sides are debatable, but the NEG-led humanity is heterogenous. This is something the NEG is trying to change to a homogeneous society through various social programs so that they could get rid of various things that lead to internal conflicts.
 * All There in the Manual: As usual, extra information can be found at the AEE thread 1 and AEE thread 2 on Spacebattles.com. A Strangely Eclipsed Aeon, The Cthulhu Tech mod (well, AEE  mod, see below) for the Eclipse Phase by the author also has some information.
 * Alternate History: At the start of Chapter 1, there is an excerpt from The Shadow Out of Time, which makes it clear that both the Elder Thing city in Antarctica and the Yithian city in Australia were historically discovered in the 1930s, putting the point of divergence quite a bit before now.
 * Word of God states that the discovery of the Elder Thing City shifted American interests out of isolationism; thus, the USA joined the League of Nations. Also, due to various political and military circumstances, the USA-Japanese war is considered almost completely separate from Europe's World War II; thus, the USA did not fight against Hitler until late 1942. This allowed him to use more resources against the USSR, prolonging the war to 1946, and Western allies nuked Berlin to prevent the Soviets from capturing it, thus making the foundations for two completly separate cities, Westberlin and Ostberlin.
 * Earth Scorpion has referred to a complete timeline of Alternate History, but it has not yet been released.
 * Alternate Universe Fic: AEE is one to Evangelion and FEAR, while Cthulhu Tech gets the dubious honor of having everything be a point-of-divergence right after Vade Mecum because ES had declared everything post-Vade Mecum unsourcebooks.
 * Ancient Conspiracy: AHNUNG, who play part of SEELE's role. Oddly, the part of the Human Instrumentality Committee has been given to the Ashcroft Council of Representatives, who don't appear to be the same group (and, as a member, Gendo has quite a lot of influence on it).
 * And I Must Scream: The self-aware souls of the cats stuck in their physical bodies, with no way to control them or alter reality, like they're used to, after they were cut off from the Dreamlands.
 * Angry Guard Dog: Cybernetically modified and armoured ArcSec guard dogs with their shoulders reaching up to average man's waist, with the chips installed in their brain to be more alert. Toja's neighbor has a retired guard dog who is quite friendly, though.
 * An Offer You Can't Refuse: Gendo "recruited" Shinji with the threat that not joining the Evangelion project will result in removal of protection that keeps Shinji from the hands of various R&D departments...and their saws.
 * Anti Air: Anti-Orbital Defenses in Chapter 18.
 * Anticlimax: The Harbinger-4 in Chapter 4.
 * Arc Words: "It was time" and any variation of it.
 * Arms Dealer: Ghouls were seen scavenging what was left over from the fight against Harbinger-3, and selling munitions to various parties, including Eldritch Society.
 * Artificial Gill: A variation with the "Eva EVA equipment", designed to keep the LCL in the body when exiting the entry plug in order to avoid complications of the sudden switching between breathing LCL and normal air when the normal supervised procedure is impossible.
 * Attack of the 50 Foot Whatever: The Harbingers are well in excess of 50 feet, both Imperial and American Customary, in scale.
 * Awakening the Sleeping Giant: One of the main reasons of the Migou invasion is to prevent the awakening of the Omnicidal Neutral Eldritch Abominations due to humanity playing with things it should not, while trying to avoid doing this themselves with excessive firepower.
 * Awesome but Impractical:
 * Tank crews view mecha as this in-universe. They show their opinion by making sarcastic comments about stable firing platforms, optimized weight distributions, and low target profiles.
 * The narration states that Chicago-2, while awesome-looking, is simply outdated for the Aeon War.
 * Backpack Cannon: Unit-00 got jury-rigged with missile launchers on its back when delaying the blind Mot.
 * The Bait: Shinji's role against Asherah was to draw its attention while the conventional forces take it out. Maybe. And that seems to be a standard tactic now, after the incident in Chapter 4.
 * Balance of Power: The Aeon War is currently in the six-year-long relative stalemate with no major victories or losses since the Fall of China, which is close to collapsing since Mot appeared on the Eastern Front.
 * Beam Spam: Mot is apparently only capable of firing one beam from each face of its trapezoid form. But when it takes an almost gratuitous amount of abuse from the NEG, its response is to The resulting barrage of beams levels entire mountains.
 * BFG:
 * London's capital-grade defenses include railguns that fire small nuclear warheads. Small, for a nuclear warhead, that is.
 * The pallet rifle, so useless in canon Evangelion, has been replaced by the Babylon, a hypervelocity, 155mm coilgun which is lovingly introduced over several paragraphs.
 * Bigfoot Sasquatch and Yeti: The real Migous, which are briefly mentioned to be a part of the Rapine Storm, are Yeti-like. The bugs in space are not actually Migou, but the name stuck.
 * Bio Augmentation: Genefixing your unborn children to remove diseases and make them smarter or tougher was entering common use before the First Arcanotech War; it was heavily restricted after the end of the war (the fake Rubber Forehead Aliens didn't like it, on account of being created that way), and there are currently in-universe debates over relaxing the restrictions. Asuka inherited a heavy amount of augmentations from her mother, which is one of the reasons that she finds things so easy.
 * Bilingual Bonus: Quite apart from the puns or references often involved in the names of Ashcroft Groups and Projects, there is untranslated German poetry and Hindu scripture scattered throughout the story.
 * Black Comedy: The story has elements of this, mostly as a result of a Lemony Narrator.
 * Black and Grey Morality: The NEG and the Ashcroft Foundation do some pretty not-nice things in the name of survival (and that's even before we get into the Evangelion and FEAR bits), such as weapons that kill souls, or make destructive neural maps of living people.
 * To be fair, the souls don't mean anything, if you're baseline human. Homo sapiens don't use them, and they don't convey any kind of immortality. For many of the NEG's opponents, though...
 * Blessed With Suck: The Sorcerers have the highest rates of cancer, and their children have a very high chance to get massive outsider taint.
 * Bond One-Liner: Just doing my job.
 * Brain Uploading: Word of God says that Elite Loyalist Nazzadi (and probably the Migou themselves) got Eclipse Phase-style backups.
 * Breather Episode:
 * Chapter 6 is unusually short and focuses on the rather cute and very curious 4-year old Asuka...a few days before her mother's scheduled Test with Unit-02. Ouch.
 * Chapter 11 is more of the interlude between chapters.
 * Chapter 13 is an epilogue to Rei-0X/Mot fight arc.
 * Bridge Bunnies: Ritsuko has lots of these. Unfortunately for her nerves, they tend to get into Tachikoma-like arguments.
 * Britain Is Only London: Most of England turned into one big city before the Arcologies were created. The Evangelion Project moved to London-2 after the Rapine Storm conquered China and got uncomfortably close to Japan.
 * Brutal Honesty: A few characters, most notably Ritsuko.
 * Bulletproof Human Shield: Averted.
 * Bug War:
 * The NEG-Migou conflict is the main example of this, although this trope is partially inverted, because the Migou are the more technologically advanced, intelligent, tool-users, and in fact have very little in common with traditional sci-fi "bugs" apart from their appearance.
 * The fight against the hatchlings of Harbinger-4, Eshmun, was a more conventional example of this trope, given that they were a bit insect-like, a bit squid-like, a bit crab-like, and had Combat Tentacles.
 * Buffy-Speak: Sometimes, with Simon (the temporary therapist assigned to Shinji) being the most blatant example.
 * Cats Are Magic: See below and Evil-Detecting Dog.
 * Cats Are Mean: Cats, as in the works of HP Lovecraft, are intelligent and don't really like humans. Much of this comes from the fact that they are now their pets, when in the past the humans were basically servitors with the task to take care of the cats' bodies, which the cats considered to be useless, since they spent almost all their time soul-surfing in the Dreamlands doing things incomprehensible to human minds. Then the Dreamlands were eaten, and now suddenly they are mere pets to former servants, while others had worse fates. Oh, and their eyes are used for security systems.
 * Cannon Fodder / Redshirt Army: For the most part the NEG Military is this as far as both the Evangelion Project and the Harbingers are concerned.
 * Cast From Hit Points: This is the side-effect of using sorcery, since it's like forcefully using the machine (human body and mind) for something that it was not designed for.
 * Chest Blaster: An improvised one,.
 * Chekhov's Gun:
 * Child Soldiers: This is Lampshaded and deconstructed, as might be expected. Project Evangelion is called on it by the Ashcroft Representative of Research, while the Representative of Ethics brushes over it. Shinji isn't too happy about it either, nor are Misato and Ritsuko. Neither is Asuka, but for entirely different reasons.
 * Chunky Salsa Rule: The Babylon Hypervelocity Rifle simply shreds the lesser Eshmun spawns.
 * The City Narrows: The Old London underground. The logistical and security nightmare that is a post-Harbinger battle cleanup certainly helps for those who wish to remain hidden.
 * Clipped-Wing Angel: One-Winged Angel Mot, while still powerful, is structurally unstable and sacrificed its attack range for regeneration, which NEG uses to further delay it from reaching London-2.
 * Cloning Blues: When each of the main fusion series has this as one of the important plot devices...well, of course this is going to feature. However, unlike canon Cthulhu Tech, the Migou continued to make Nazzadi soldiers even after the defection, as reinforcements (and replacements) for the Loyalists, at least according to NEG Intelligence. (Because, really, how else could they produce that many soldiers?)
 * Collateral Angst: Toja's angst about failing to protect his sister is the main focus of that subplot, while his sister herself is rarely featured.
 * Combat Pragmatist: Almost everybody, considering the nature of the fic.
 * Competence Zone: Justified; it matches with real life. With the exceptions of Rei and Asuka, who were trained to pilot the EVAs from early age, everybody below 18 is about as competent as might be expected for their age, including Shinji, who survives because of raw talent, sheer luck and Unit-01's berserking. Everybody who is above 18 but not competent at what they're meant to do is an idiot, (about to go) crazy, or both.
 * Con Lang: Nazzadi appears to be an internally consistent language incorporating vocabulary from the Romance languages, but with a more Germanic grammatical structure.
 * Constantly Curious: "Leli" is this and her sister Iry is an older version.
 * Containment Field:
 * This is mentioned a lot of times when Arcanotech is involved, particularly in weapons.
 * There are also containment wards used when Mot is causing Aeon War Syndrome.
 * Cosmic Horror Story: It's a Mythos story. It has added Evangelion. What else would it be?
 * Couldn't Find a Pen: One prisoner tried to draw a summoning circle with her saliva before her hands were locked down by a straitjacket-type exoskeleton.
 * Creepy Child:
 * The two girls from the prologue.
 * Rei. In-universe, she creeps out Gendo, and he seems to be fond of her.
 * Critical Annoyance: They didn't had time to reprogram Unit-01's LITAN AI to ignore some modifications,.
 * Cryptic Conversation: Along with the whole prologue, pretty much all conversations that don't refer to immediate events (and sometimes those too) can be extremely cryptic.
 * Culture Clash: This leads to various issues regarding the Nazzadi and Xenomixes, especially in mixed families. There are also issues with the Nazzadi and Xenomixed among the older generation, to whom they're immediately associated with an unwinnable war.
 * Curb Stomp Battle:
 * Asherah, the re-skinned Sachiel, owning everything that NEG throws at it...and being smug about it.

""They held their posts at the whim of the Senate and the President, they were not democratically elected, and they were technically speaking, nothing more than advisors.
 * The introduction of Asuka and Unit-02 is pretty much this. The music it is set to is appropriately named.
 * Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Blanks are made by creating a secondary artificial neural network in captured humans and xenomixes. Notably, this trope name is literally false; the presence of a soul is something which can be quantified.
 * Cyborg: The Military personnel are modified for war, starting with eye modifications as noted below, to serious modifications that fighter pilots undergo in order to be able to compete with the Migou air force.
 * Deadpan Snarker: Almost every character shows some elements of this, most notably Shinji.
 * Death of a Thousand Cuts: Lampshaded in the Mot fight with the Migou.
 * Decontamination Chamber: Used by naked Gendo in the beginning of Chapter 12.
 * Delaying Action: Done against Mot.
 * Depleted Phlebotinum Shells: Colour-boosted warheads. Magic Colour... that kills souls.
 * Designer Babies: The first Nazzadi were this. Continued by the Migou with the new-and-improved and most importantly loyal elite loyalist Nazzadi.
 * Desolation Shot: Old London. Steadily getting more desolate, too, it should be noted, even before the collateral damage from the Harbingers is taken into account.
 * The Determinator: Gendo, as seen during the Unit 00 incident, is one. Likewise, throughout the entire Harbinger-3 incident, he was on just enough painkillers to allow him to think through the pain of his hands, without showing any sign of discomfort.
 * Didn't See That Coming: Discussed in Chapter 10. When the TITAN is reporting what is known about Mot, Misato remarks that at least they knew the Known Unknowns.
 * Discontinuity Nod: It is noted that, in-universe, the Nephilim technology evolved from the useless Mortal Remains-style leash dogs (who are also nearly-guaranteed to go out of control and will always try to kill their handler first) to, among other models, the spider-like Tsuchigomos (which put the squishy human pilot inside a safe armour-plated pod, and are more like mini-Engels). The Loyalist Nazzadi seems to be a nod to the elf-life Nazzadi of the canon Cthulhu Tech.
 * Disaster Scavengers: Non-After the End variant with ghouls scavenging left-over munitions after the Asherah battle.
 * Doorstopper: There are young-adult novels shorter than chapter 1 of AEE. Chapter 2 was longer. Chapter 5 was longer.
 * Divided We Fall: The Ashcroft Foundation and the military have a little bit of internal conflict when it comes to Harbingers.
 * Does This Remind You of Anything?: Maya getting overloaded with data.
 * Don't Answer That: The Investigators tried to question Shinji, who is assumed to be a prime target of those infiltrators in the airport, but he had a high-level lawyer do the talking for him.
 * Dramatization: The in-universe movie about the Migou "First Strike" on Antarctica.
 * Dreaming of Things to Come: The German student from the 1920's dreams of the times of Aeon War. Maybe.
 * Easy Logistics: Averted in general. It's also the reason why the NEG can't use strategic conventional nukes as mines against Mot again and why Unit-02 won't be in time transferring from Chicago to Europe.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Where to start? With the Harbingers, which are the Heralds but even more Lovecraftian? With the fungoid insects of the Migou? With the Deep Ones?
 * Electronic Eyes:
 * Those who serve in the military are offered to replace their organic eyes with artificial ones (or harcontacts, hard permanent contact lenses, for those who refuse) due to things on the battlefield, mostly lasers, that tend to fry the eyeballs just by looking at them.
 * Elite Mooks:
 * Loyalist Nazzadi come in an Elite variety, who have extensive cybernetic and genetic enhancements, and are issued Migou-level weaponry and gear.
 * Combat Blanks, reprogrammed humans, are more akin to a light suit of power armor even before they have equipment, and have small antimatter reaction chambers where their guts would be which are used to fuel their integrated weapons and enhancements.
 * Emergency Broadcast: Broadcasted in English and Nazzadi languages.
 * Epigraph: Every chapter starts with one. Some of the quotes have been appropriated from real-life sources, while others are thinly veiled Infodumps.
 * Everything's Better With Penguins: This Pen-Pen is a Antarctican Urbanised Albino Emperor Penguin, which means that he's descended from the giant albino penguins in At the Mountains of Madness, resident in the Elder Thing city.
 * Everything's Better With Rainbows: Except they are either colorless or of colour out of space.
 * Everyone Is Right Handed: Word of God says that Nazzadi are primarily left-handed, since that part of human base was basically flipped by the Migou.
 * Everything Is Online: Averted. Since the Migou are the masters of hacking, the Grid is heavily protected, segmented into regional parts, and contact between them is allowed only at specific times through specific heavily monitored channels.
 * Evil Is Deathly Cold:
 * Mot, as a passive effect, appears to draw energy in from its surroundings.
 * Evil Detecting Baby: Infants are particularly sensitive to anything strange. There is a much better alternative in...
 * Evil Detecting Cats: Cats are noted to be sensitive to anything abnormal, so they are used as detectors for that kind of thing, and are incorporated into the CATSEYE security system.
 * Evil Tower of Ominousness:
 * Gendo has one. In fact, he practices sorcery in a tower, which looks over a city, which is in a hidden cavern underneath another city composed largely of pyramidal arcologies. That man has serious style.
 * Mot transformed itself into the spire that kept extending both upwards and downwards in order to get inside the Geofront. After it was killed, Mot left behind a kilometer-tall spire-corpse for Ashcroft to clean up.
 * Expy:
 * Tsuchigumos are Lovecraftian, lobotomized Tachikomas. One of the pilots of these things acted like a Tachikoma for good measure.
 * Shinji is a sarcastic bastard.
 * A remarkable number of Shinji's classmates seem to be (sometimes genderflipped) expies of various other anime characters.
 * Expospeak and Info Dump: Well done actually.
 * Eye Scream: Hollow socket variant with Rei. In the battle against Asherah, it.
 * Failsafe Failure: Averted; most of the failsafe failures were the results of said failsafes being damaged or destroyed. Asuka complained on how they screwed things up when dealing with Subsystem Damage, though.
 * False Flag Operation:
 * Fan Disservice: Chapter 14.
 * Faster Than Light Travel: Averted; nobody has it, not even the Migou.
 * The Federation: The New Earth Government, of which the political branches are currently infighting on the subject of regional autonomy and/or centralization.
 * Fictional Document: Excerpts used as epigraphs for chapters and the diary from Chapter 14.
 * Firing One-Handed: Subverted, as firing the Eva-scale Babylon rifle one-handed is a sure way to damage the Eva's arm, and hurt your own hand (and slap yourself in the face). Then again, one of Unit 01's arms was already crippled, so he didn't have much choice.
 * Fish Out of Temporal Water: The German's experience with the Dream future.
 * Fiery Coverup: Asherah and the NEGA pretty much destroyed most of the clues and evidence of the unidentified agents in the airport by fighting each other (well, the former pwning the latter to be more accurate).
 * Fisher Kingdom: Leng.
 * Forensic Drama: Has elements of this, usually when the side-characters get the limelight, such as the forensic OIS team.
 * Foreshadowing: All the time. At some points, it seems that dropping plot hints is something the author is actually addicted to.
 * A Form You Are Comfortable With: The visual autocensors reduce Eldritch Abominations to a form that can be understood. Mostly. For a while. Then you go mad.
 * Flanderization: In-universe, Theresa Ashcroft is treated as the sole inventor of arcanotechnology, while she was actually just the first to combine the various inaccuracies in the Standard Model and Quantum Mechanics into a single scientific field.
 * Foregone Conclusion: It's a rewrite of an Elseworlds Fusion Fic following the canon storyline of a TV series set in a Mythos universe. The exact details are unknown, but details have a nasty tendency to drive people mad.
 * Forgotten Birthday: Shinji's birthday, on top of a really bad day.
 * Friend or Foe:
 * Functional Magic: Broadly categorized into Occult (old school magic), Empirical Sorcery (magic after applying the scientific method) and Theoretical Sorcery (the logical extreme of Mad Mathematician).
 * Fusion Fic: In addition to merging Neon Genesis Evangelion, Cthulhu Tech and FEAR, the Revelation Space and Eclipse Phase stuff that started to appear heavily in later parts of ANE are now featured more prominently.
 * Gaias Vengeance: The old shoggoth systems waking up to battle the foreign Leng ecosystem.
 * Giant Flyer: Harbingers 2 and 6.
 * Ghost Town: Rei lives in an otherwise abandoned arcology dome. It's all clean, and tidy, and...empty.
 * Giant Wall of Spacetime-Violating Madness: Asherah turns into one.
 * A Glass of Chianti: A Mysterious Watcher at the end of Chapter 12 had it until he dropped it (off-screen) and then squashed it further with his bare foot.
 * Godzilla Threshold: Misato's second plan against Mot would have been rejected if the situation was less desperate, and meanwhile the Migou are deploying their actual battleships.
 * Go Mad From the Revelation: Duh.
 * Shinji nearly goes mad from almost being stepped on by Asherah while he was at the airport.
 * Auto-censors are not perfect.
 * Grammar Nazi: Kensuke does this to Toja in chapter 13.
 * Gratuitous German: Surprisingly good, accurate, untranslated German. Most of the time.
 * The Great Flood:
 * Grievous Harm With a Body: A Blank throwing what was left of her Human Shield at the enemy.
 * Half Truth: A lot of these are thrown around.
 * Hazmat Suit: Usually seen in Colour-contaminated areas.
 * Heavily Armored Mook: The Combat Blanks.
 * Homeschooled Kids / Corruption of a Minor: NEG has forbidden homeschooling on the basis that cultists would use it to their advantage, basically legally training the next-generation of cultists. Played with when Shinji complains that the high brass made him go to school when homeschooling would be much more efficient in his case, considering that breaking the no-homeschooling law is nothing compared to him being drafted as a Child Soldier.
 * Huge Holographic Head: Gendo does this in the Father/Son reunion scene, although it's actually just rendered onto Shinji's Augmented Reality-glasses.
 * Human Aliens: The Nazzadi are so human compared to the other sentient beings that you will forget that they were aliens in the first place, especially the younger generation. Because...well, genetically, they're an artificially-created Human Subspecies.
 * Humans Are Morons: How almost everybody non-human views humanity in general and the NEG in particular. This view is especially held by the Migou (and User:Earth Scorpion).
 * 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.
 * Human Shield: A Blank swiftly uses a captured medic to protect herself from enemy fire. NEG soldiers are trained to ignore human hostages.
 * Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: As seen in the one big dimensional rip in the sky near Chicago-2, courtesy of Harbinger-6.
 * Ill Girl: Imi, the girl who Toja ran out to try to rescue (and one of his sister's friends), was looking for her medicine. Toja's sister and Rei are also examples, but Rei is Rei.
 * Incredibly Lame Pun: "Eva EVA equipment"; it got a chuckle out of Ritsuko.
 * Inertial Dampening: Aircraft pilots are heavily modified with cybernetics so that they could tolerate high Gs in order to compete with their Migou counterparts.
 * And they still can't cope with Misato's driving.
 * Instant Death Radius: Mot is a Ramiel expy, so it's a given. It gets a little bit more literal after the NEG's initial assault.
 * Institutional Apparel: With the built-in straitjacket.
 * Invisibility: One of DAEVA's (now rechristened as DAHACA) selling points.
 * Irony: Director Khoury (named after the parents who never existed in the first place), a Nazzadi ex-soldier serving on the invasion fleet (which has no real history), currently holding a position of Director of Secret Services (which officially does not exist).
 * It Amused Me: Nyarlathotep's agenda for almost everything.
 * It Got Worse: The aftermath of Operation Ankou, both on the battlefield and elsewhere.
 * Jaw Breaker:
 * Jerkass: A mild version with Ritsuko, who unlike in canon doesn't act nice, and is usually blatantly unemphatic, but she is so consistent about it that she comes off as less of jerkass she was in later parts Neon Genesis Evangelion and as more of a person who tries to cope with her job that has a very real (and inevitable) risk of being driven to insanity.
 * 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...appropriately, in a very horrifying, Lovecraftian sort of way. Also, even knowing what the hell was going on in Evangelion won't help you much here.
 * Kansas City Shuffle:
 * With everyone's attention focused on Mot and the AWS it generates, various agencies and factions make moves in both open warfare and the Secret War.
 * Rei in Unit-00 acting as a decoy for Mot, along with lots of sports cars.
 * Lampshade Hanging: Really quite common, in the form of:
 * Lemony Narrator
 * Law of Inverse Recoil: Averted, and the Firing One-Handed example below is one of the reasons why.
 * Layman's Terms: Common, both in narration and by characters, usually Misato telling Ritsuko to repeat something, only in human language (figuratively).
 * Lego Genetics: Averted. Gene fixing is a very complicated process with its own share of problems, like a genetically-enhanced math genius being unable to recognize faces, including her own in the mirror.
 * Les Collaborateurs: The Migou "cultists", who work for the Migou out of their own will. They're dangerous because, by and large, they're not cultists in the Lovecraftian sense. They may be fanatically devoted to the Migou, but within that frame of reference, their actions are fully sane.
 * Let No Crisis Go to Waste: A lot of people use the chaos caused by the Harbingers showing up (and the immediate aftermath) to further their own goals.
 * Little Hero Big War: As important as the Evangelions and the Harbingers are, the Aeon War doesn't revolve around them.
 * Lockdown: Heavy quarantine on the Budapest-infected locations. Certain specialists were sent to deal with it.
 * Locked Out of the Fight: Asuka and Unit-02, locked out of the Mot fight with the very untimely transfer.
 * Lost Colony: The Nazzadi fake memories have Earth as one of the renegade colonies as a result of slower-that-light travel.
 * Losing Your Head and Helping Hands: The nervous system of the Combat Blanks (brainwashed, enhanced people) is modified to be autonomous, to the point where getting shot in the head won't stop them and severed limbs are still under their control.
 * Lovecraft Lite: Has surface elements of this.
 * Mad Scientist: As before, Ritsuko is slowly creeping toward this...and is all too aware of it.
 * Magic From Technology: Because the Migou don't have Shoggoth heritage which enables humans to use magic, they have to rely on specific implants to reproduce it.
 * Marshmallow Hell: Subverted. Unfortunately for Shinji, Misato was wearing thick, hard, and above all, non-squishy armour.
 * Mass Teleportation:
 * Mechanical Evolution: In the very round-about way, Humanity is the result of the still-functional Shoggoth machinery trying to work without its now-dead masters.
 * Melee a Trois: The NEG, Migou and Mot were engaged in this before the first two backed off to lick their wounds.
 * Meaningful Rename
 * Mind Probe: Used as a standard technique by the OIS. There is even comparative discussion by OIS agents on the ease of probing dead brains (and how decomposition affects the procedure) as compared to live ones.
 * Mind Rape:
 * Looking at a Harbinger, even through auto-censored video feeds, induces insanity and nightmares very quickly.
 * Used by various groups to get information, or just to inflict torment.
 * Mini Mecha:
 * The Tsuchigumo, as befits their heritage.
 * The Recon mecha are described as being borderline Powered Armor.
 * Minovsky Physics: Arcanotech, or as Word of God said it in the Nobody Dies thread, a "Convenient Hand Wave". That doesn't stop rather in-depth discussion of the physics behind everything in the forum thread, of course.
 * Mockumentary: Instructional Lessons For the Youth of Today and Stuff, the TV show that Misato watches in Chapter 4, is styled like one.
 * Mobile Maze: Implied to be one of the security measures under London-2. Misato still got lost even though it was off.
 * 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.
 * The Mole: Besides the Infiltrator Blanks, there are also willing followers who truly believe that surrendering to the Migou is a good idea.
 * Morally Dubious Corprate Executive: The Ashcroft Foundation and their representatives, compared to the altruistic shining knights of the canon Cthulhu Tech.
 * The Mole: Besides the Infiltrator Blanks, there are also willing followers who truly believe that surrendering to the Migou is a good idea.
 * Morally Dubious Corprate Executive: The Ashcroft Foundation and their representatives, compared to the altruistic shining knights of the canon Cthulhu Tech.

And if you believed that, then you might be interested in purchasing some prime real estate in Tibet.""

"The tactics could be summarised as “Use A Gun. And If That Doesn’t Work, Use More Gun”."
 * More Dakka:
 * The NEG high command's plan against Eshmun.


 * Unit 02 is positively covered in dakka-causing devices, and lasers.
 * It has been noted that while tanks follow a "One Big Gun" school of design, mecha tend to be more based around multiple low-recoil weapons like lasers and missiles.
 * Mythology Gag:
 * Post-Natum Modification Bill.
 * Shinji thinking himself to be better than the prince in the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty (Shinji was familiar with the original, NSFW version.)
 * When Shinji is learing to properly pilot Unit-01, it sports the original purple/green paintjob specifically made for testing purposes.
 * The show Misato was watching in ch. 4 ruthlessly (and hilariously) deconstructs Evangelion's "hedgehog dilemma" theme.
 * A medic dies not long after he is introduced. His name is Marek Janckowski.
 * After being submerged in blue LCL used in what may have been the memory-backing up proceedure, Rei's hair was temporarily dyed blue.
 * The "recreation area" where Rei lives is a ten by ten patch of grass with a tree (trans)planted in it, with a swing on it.
 * As both the Evangelion and Engel Projects are researching the corpse of Eshmun, a doctor from the Engel Project said that they have codenamed the Engel design based off its offspring "Shamshel".
 * My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Harbinger-based Aeon War Syndrome usually does this region-wide, with Mot's presence making various sensitive people go crazy, and the Children seems to have more "natural" version of this when Harbingers are about to show up.
 * Mysterious Watcher: Near the end of Chapter 12.
 * Neck Lift: Done by the Heavy Combated Infantry Blank, in Chapter 7.
 * Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The technical classification of the Evangelions, "arcanocyberxenobiological organisms" translates roughly as magic cyborg alien robots.
 * No Holds Barred Beatdown:
 * Shinji on Eshmun after the former snapped.
 * Corporal Xuan Do on the Blank in chapter 7.
 * No Transhumanism Allowed: Like in Cthulhu Tech, thanks to Nazzadi leaders any research into anything transhuman was stopped (at least officially). Unlike in Cthulhu Tech, the influence of those old Nazzadi leaders is starting to fade.
 * Nothing Is Scarier: In Chapter 17 when Asuka used the camera feeds to figure out the situation with the Harbinger attack, she finds out that the Harbinger was nowhere in sight and that everything was way too calm.
 * Nuclear Option: Arcanochromatic nukes. Not used because of the risk of possible Migou response with strategic orbital bombardment. Conventional nukes are fair play, though, as the...
 * Nuclear Weapons Taboo: ...is thoroughly, thoroughly averted from the source material. Although the nuclear weapons used aren't (always) conventional ones, that's just because the use of variant r-state electrons (which act like muons) make the reaction easier to achieve, to the extent that tanks can fire small nukes. Which leads to...
 * Nuke'Em : ...as a standard response. Harbinger-5, Mot, is hit by a 12 megatonne pure fusion device, to soften it up, before the Evas and the Navy attack from long range.
 * Nuclear weapons are then used against it again,.
 * One Side of the Story: After reviewing the Harbinger-4 battle, Asuka criticizes Shinji's dismal performance under the assumption that he also had at least had 8 years of training.
 * One Steve Limit: Averted. Shinji's foster little sister is named Hikary. Considering the number of people named either Hikari/y or Horaki in ANE, Earth Scorpion is probably doing it on purpose.
 * One-Winged Angel: Mot, going from the equivalent of Series!Ramiel to Rebuild!Ramiel.
 * One World Order: Word of God says that the NEG (or at least the Unionist, rather than Federalist parts of it) is trying to systematically, and slowly, lessen the difference between the the former nations that make it up, with the goal of both sanitising the culture of harmful (like, say, Cthulhu-worshipping) influences, and preventing internal division which might weaken it. The NEG has explicitly been called a proto-Interim Coalition of Mankind, which is to say, like a secular, efficent Imperium of Man.
 * The Only One: Averted, everybody who are expected to be competent at their jobs will be competent. There is a little of this trope with Asuka, who feels that most of the higher ups are compromising her piloting, though she knows better.
 * Only a Flesh Wound: Ritsuko after the Cast From Hit Points ritual.
 * Operation Blank:
 * Operation Xerxes, a More Dakka plan against Harbinger-4.
 * Operation Ankou, Nuke'Em plan against Harbinger-5.
 * Our Gods Are Greater: Now renamed to Harbingers, with the term Herald being a supercategory for the former.
 * Our Souls Are Different: For humans and their derivatives (or, at least, baseline humans), souls are useless evolutionary baggage that come from being Shoggoth-descended. That's an anomaly; most creatures, like the Migou, use their souls (which is to say, higher dimensional parts of their body) to think. Shoggoths are meant to, but Earth-life is broken, and, against design, has managed to evolve sentience, then sapience, only using three dimensions. Parapsychics and sorcerers tap into this heritage to fuel their powers.
 * Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Averted. While weakened, organized religion still exists and fares well. Some also proclaim that the empirical "soul" discovered by science is different from the spiritual soul.
 * Overheating:
 * Paranoia Fuel: Few In-Universe examples:
 * Played with when Misato suspects that Shinji, being Gendo's son, might be masterfully hiding his true intentions behind the mask of normalcy, until dismissing it as paranoia on her part.
 * The almost undetectable Blanked Infiltrators are this for the NEG military.
 * Pastiche: Chapter 14. One massive Lovecraft-homage, written in his style. And then finished by a preview where Misato promises more Fan Service in Book II.
 * Path of Inspiration: Played with, for the Nazzadi religion/philosophy. It was fabricated by the Migou to maximize their efficiency, and also designed to be cult-resistant by encouraging people to be open with each other; the thing is that it works, to the extent that some humans have begun to practice it, too.
 * People Jars: The medical variation with Rei inside.
 * Phlebotinum Analogy: When Ritsuko explains what they found out researching Eshmun's corpse to Misato, the latter mentions "classical" waves and particles. This annoyed Ritsuko.
 * Pistol Whipping: Xuan Do beats the Infiltrator Blank with the butt of her rifle.
 * Playing Possum: What a Migou cultist ends up doing in Chapter 7, completely by accident.
 * Point Defenseless: Averted. Those laser point-defense systems on the Evangelions are good at their jobs.
 * Poisoned Weapons: Poisoned tiny hair-like carbon-fibre syringes are used.
 * Post Cyber Punk: The arcologies, and the New Earth Government in general. Even more so than in Aeon Natum Engel with deeper fusion of Revelation Space and Eclipse Phase.
 * Power Creep, Power Seep: The reason why User:Earth Scorpion didn't completely replace Cthulhu Tech with Eclipse Phase is that the latter's elements break a lot of NGE's story pillars. With the digitizing of the mind and resleeving, Shinji and Asuka are completely unnecessary when Gendo could just fork Rei to fill in the gaps.
 * Powder Keg Crowd: The people at the airport panicked; some fled, some attacked the police. Of course, the fact that Harbinger-3 was currently attacking might have had something to do with how volatile they were. And the OIS sub-storyline seems to suggest that it was an arranged cover for some other group.
 * Precocious Crush: Toja got himself at least one such crush from a 9-year old (or a whole class of them, depending on how you interpret the scene) because he tried to save one of his sister's classmates.
 * Prophetic Fallacy: Implied when Mot shows sooner than expected, not to mention more powerful than expected. As of Chapter 18 this is questioned even further.
 * Proud Warrior Race Guy: The Loyalist Nazzadi, though the new Elite dropped this. Some of the Traditionalist families are also like this.
 * Punched Across The City: Harbinger-3 does this to Unit 01.
 * Purple Prose: Avoids the usual shortcomings associated with this style...most of the time.
 * Pyrrhic Victory:
 * Race Lift: Several characters were Type-1 uplifted to Nazzadi or xenomixes, to represent the demographics of the setting.
 * Rapid Aging: Involved in Project Herkunft Replica training.
 * Reality Ensues: If one concept defines Aeon Entelechy Evangelion, it's this. Insofar as reality applies in a setting with sorcery and lobotomized god-monsters, it has a tendency to rise from the depths, roaring, and slide its tentacles into any scene from the source material that it can.
 * Real Robot: The non-Eva mechas are this, and the Evas themselves are more closer to this when the AT-Fields are not involved. In fact, this appears to be a setting element; Asuka criticizes Shinji for failing to use Unit 01's AT-Field to get away with firing the Babylon one-handedly, with a strong implication that she could do it.
 * Reality Warper: The AT-Fields, and anything with the ability to produce one.
 * Reality Warping Is Not a Toy
 * Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The Harbinger codenames are based off Canaanite mythology; this might be considered a Mythology Gag, in both senses of the phrase, because the Caananite faith was, like Judaism, a semitic religion.
 * The Remake: of Aeon Natum Engel.
 * Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Implied with the OSS, better known as Secret Services.
 * Ritual Magic: Imported from Cthulhu Tech, this is the only type of magic humanity can use. Used to.
 * The Roaring Twenties: The events described in the Chapter 14 Diary take place in the post-WWI Germany.
 * Robot War: The execution of Operation Xerxes is heavily coordinated by TITAN AI network; something that the NEG military normally restricts more, due to the threat of Migou hacking. It has also been stated that a lot of vehicles feature the human crew monitoring and guiding the Limited AI systems that actually control them.
 * Room Full of Crazy: Rei's home, at least from Shinji's perspective.
 * Rouge Angles of Satin: Averted, mostly. It's rather well edited, with only a slight tendency to excess verbosity, especially when the Author is expositioning, and very few grammar/spelling gaffes.
 * Sadist Teacher: Ms. Sweet-Corazon, the physics teacher. Of course, considering her name...
 * Sadly Mythtaken: The invading aliens were mistakenly identified as a Migou, a species that are actually a part of Rapine Storm, but this late in the war the correction is hardly practical.
 * Sanity Slippage: For obvious reasons.
 * Scenery Porn: Chapter 5 has higher dimensional non-Euclidean scenery porn, where detail is lovingly lavished over a metaphorical description of the higher dimensions close to Earth.
 * Secret Test of Character: Calvin likes to make these for Asuka, to the point that Asuka is almost starting to think that all of interactions with "Uncle Cal" are these.
 * Self-Destruct Mechanism: The Migou biologically dissolve very fast, seemingly as a part of this trope. The Combat Blanks also explode upon death, and the Migou used infiltrator-Blanks with implanted antimatter capsules to decapitate the North American NEG command.
 * Shaping Your Attacks: Making the nuke explode in one specific direction without destroying everything else, like the Evangelion where said nuke is housed.
 * Shaped Like Itself: Description of more mundane (and sometimes not so mundane) objects tend to be like this, using Buffy-Speak most of the time.
 * Shield-Bash:
 * Shoot the Hostage: Standard NEG Military policy is to ignore Human Shields.
 * Shown Their Work: The author is a physics student, and it shows.
 * Shout Out: All the time.
 * Show Within a Show: Misato watches a scene from Doom of the Revenge of the Baroness of the Darkness of the West. Later on, Shinji, Toja and Kensuke see a bad patriotic film depicting the events of the Migou "First Strike" on Antarctica, obviously based on the similarly overacted "Second Impact" film in the Evangelion series.
 * Sliding Scale of Robot Intelligence: Various, starting with dumb LAIs, moving up to muses, a form of personal assistant programme, and ending with TITAN networks, although nobody has a idea of the latter's level of sapience or if it even exists.
 * Sliding Scale of Villain Threat:
 * While waking up Cthulhu is probably the worst thing that can happen to everybody, on their own the Esoteric Order of Dagon is the weakest player in the Aeon War. Their resources and manpower are limited, and the only reason they aren't wiped out is that the big boys of Aeon War are too busy killing each other.
 * After their initial success in China, the Rapine Storm progress was halted and the new quarantine measures (the no-man's overkilling zone) nearly guarantees that no Storm army will pass, and due to their insanity they keep wasting resources trying and failing to breach the quarantine.
 * The Children of Chaos (Nyarlathotep) and Death Shadows (Hastur) cults. Their goal is to subvert the humanity from the inside, and even with the NEG's infamously strong security, these guys keep finding holes in it.
 * The Migou are the main enemies of humanity. They have enough firepower to easily defeat NEG and bomb humanity to the stone age. The reason they haven't done that already is that they are afraid of waking up something worse in the process.
 * Various Eldritch Abominations, both active and sleeping.
 * Soapbox Sadie: Sad to say, quite a few members of the class seem to consider Hikary one of these.
 * Somebody Set Up Us the Bomb:
 * The Migou successfully conquered most of northern parts of North America thanks to the infiltrator blank with a built-in anti-matter bomb that killed most of regional command stationed in Alaska just as the attack started. Since then, NEG security has become even tighter.
 * In chapter 12, this happens.
 * Sophisticated As Hell: A noted element in the narration. It seems to be some by-product of mixing Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness and Deadpan Snarker.
 * Soul Power: The Psychic Powers and Arcane magic seems to be this.
 * Spider Tank: The Tsuchigumo model of Nephilim, a kind of lobotomised Eldritch Abomination based on a spin-off from the original Evangelion Project, are rather arachnid.
 * Spoiled Brat: According to Hikary, most of the school is like this as a result of them being children of Ashcroft elite. She also claims that it's averted with the Horaki sisters, where their father made sure that they understood that being a part of Ashcroft elite is no reason to be become snotty. Of course, she might be an Unreliable Narrator for that...
 * Spy Satellites: A few remaining satellites that were not shot down by the Migou. Their usefulness is hindered by Migou's orbital superiority.
 * Square-Cube Law: One of the points the Author mercilessly lampshades on when the Mechas are present, EVAs included.
 * Starfish Aliens: The Migou.
 * State Sec: Although cracks do exist, on the whole Earth Scorpion's interpretation of Cthulhu Tech State Sec in the Core and Vade Mecum basically makes them something that not even Solid Snake will sneak by, and also making it impossible for the Damnation View's "Everything is Falling Apart" scenario to happen.
 * Sufficiently Analyzed Magic: With magic being just a very special form of physics (one that drives people insane), the scientific method is naturally applicable and consequently applied. Scientists just have a tendency to die, a lot, from handing phenomena men (and women) don't quite know the real danger of (just like radiation science in its infancy, only with more insanity and less people being run over by horses).
 * Summoning Ritual: One asylum prisoner tried to make a summoning circle under the influence of Mot before being restrained. One of the Military suggested that Mot is a result of Migou's botched summoning.
 * Super Prototype: The Evangelions to Engels, in the sense that the Cray supercomputer was a prototype for a gaming desktop. From a strategic standpoint against conventional enemies like the Migou, the Eva aren't worth very much either, as the Engels can be mass-produced and don't require Child Soldiers as pilots. From a tactical standpoint, on the other hand, an Evangelion will tear a formation of Nazzadi Loyalists a new one. On the other hand, from a strategic standpoint against enemies like the Harbingers, the Evas are indispensable.
 * Supernatural Sensitivity
 * Super Soldier: The Replicas, Combat Blanks and the Loyalist Elites.
 * Super Speed: Harbinger-4 is capable of traveling at super-sonic speed, but it's unclear if it was responsible for the anomalous signal in Chapter 4.
 * Suspiciously Specific Denial: Maya's report about not screwing up taking care of Ritsuko's cats while she is away.
 * Switching POV: Alternate PoV characters tend, on the whole, to have nasty things happen to them.
 * Tank Goodness: While there are still mecha, especially Engels, they have been toned down in favor of hovertank-like land-hugging gunships and tanks.
 * Techno Babble-Magi Babble
 * Technology Porn: The technologies used in the story tend to get explained, even when they're using purely fictional laws of physics to operate, and, of course, certain things (like, say, the Total Information Tactical Analysis Networks) get rather loving descriptions of their operating principles.
 * Thememobile: Ritsuko at one point calls Misato's car "Misatomobile." Misato is not amused.
 * Theme Naming: The Space-Combat Project has a spear theme, with the facility in Germany named after one of three divine spears of Japan.
 * There Are No Therapists: Averted, thanks to the story's Cthulhu Tech heritage. Shinji is actually subjected to mandatory counseling, to prevent him from going crazy.
 * There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Seems to be the general policy of the military.
 * They Would Cut You Up: What Gendo says that various R&D departments would do to Shinji to find out why he can pilot the Evangelion. And Gendo is completely honest, right?
 * Think Nothing of It: Xuan Do's Just doing my job.
 * Tim Taylor Technology: Mocked in chapter 12.
 * Too Happy to Live: Chapter 6 is pretty much this.
 * Tracking Device:
 * Translation Convention: Averted with the sections of untranslated Nazzadi language. However, you can normally work out the meaning from the context, and some fans have tried to build a basic translation guide.
 * Understatement: Quite common, considering the writing style.
 * Unfriendly Fire: Done by The Mole.
 * Urban Warfare: We see a glimpse of it in chapter 7.
 * Viewers Are Geniuses: Hey, guys, let's spend a paragraph or two explaining how what the Harbinger is about to do is impossible, before it does it anyway. And, of course, the author much prefers implication to actually stating plot elements (while loving to Info Dump on technological matters).
 * Viral Transformation: The Leng ecosystem, a combination of Zerg Creep, Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri xenofungus, Tiberium (of the really bad Tiberium Sun variety) and god knows what else, spreads out in Storm-controlled territory.
 * The old shoggoth machinery is now turning the Earth native ecosystem into something more...efficient, in order to counter the Leng ecosystem.
 * What We Now Know to Be True: Real-life modern science is treated like this whenever it gets mentioned.
 * Weakened By the Light: Places that are designed and illuminated in such way that are no shadows, as a security measure to prevent shadow-using entities from infiltrating.
 * We Will Have Perfect Health in The Future: Courtesy of Genefixing. Except for those who get the short end of the stick by having side-effects caused by said genefixing, like Imi who is in constant pain and has to use painkillers.
 * World Building
 * X Meets Y: It's as if HP Lovecraft, Alastair Reynolds, and Stephen Baxter got drunk together and watched all of Neon Genesis Evangelion in one sitting, then plotted out the setting.

I have a bad feeling about this...