Little nightmares 3: Triple threat

How it all started. how they became big while we got small

Close on a century ago, a meteor fell to our planet Earth from a place in outer space even the greatest scientific minds could not quite pinpoint.
The first investigations did show however that the object had been travelling at a very great speed close to light over at least several thousand light years.
No small distance to be sure, but a far cry from the estimated distance of our solar system with our supposed interstellar neighbor Andromeda.

This pulsing "meteor" that descended almost silently turned out not to be an inanimate slab of rock after all.
Too late, it was discovered that it was in fact a mass of alien living tissue or more specifically, an egg sac.
A cataclysmic explosion that shook the Earth itself later, and humanity was doomed.
The hulking barbarians that would come to be known as the Angels, a subspecies of humankind said to share much of our DNA, allowing them to not only survive but thrive on our most likely vastly different atmosphere from theirs despite how in both smartness and size, we were as different to those mindless beasts as night and day.

Already having the upper hand from the sheer devastation their arrival had wrought, the survivors of mankind could offer little resistance to their bloodthirsty stampede in which they laid waste to the land to become the new masters of this world they unceremoniously claimed for themselves.

As out of left field as this mournful tragedy seemed, there was in fact some inclination that it may in fact have been no coincidence in the slightest but a planned assault that would certainly happen, with the question being when rather than if.
It was observed that the swarm of alien giants took great glee in gobbling the vast stacks of toxic sewage that had been clogging the oceans of the world to a worryingly worsening degree.
That they often turned from their hapless prey, us, in order to first chow down on the piles of improperly disposed rubbish that had practically formed trash cities in most every corner of the once serene and undisturbed wilderness.

That they preferred to linger in smoggy industrial giants before reluctantly moving to the still smoky but far less difficult to breath countryside.
How they seemed to grow larger and more bulbous with each filthy mound of trash and contaminated lake or river they imbibed into their constantly growing forms barely scratched by even the deadliest ammunition available.

Despite what some tunnel-visioned nostalgic fellows might say, humanity had not been in the best of times prior to the global crises that came to be known as "the first impact" soon to be followed by many others in a similar vein as world war 2 to world war 1.
Greed fueled monopolism had been taking the world by storm ever since Germany, but more importantly Japan had won a decisive victory against the remainder of the nations whom even combined, could not stand against what the victors of World War 2 self-titled, the Axis powers.
Multiple nuclear weapons, each with destructive potential enough to blow entire continents to smithereens many times over were launched in my country and Germany's single-minded pursuit for absolute authority.

Busy infighting and even busier trying to enter into a peace deal in which they would be spared and their fingers tinted with gold at the expense of their people's wellbeing, the governments of the world put up very little of a fight to resist this barbaric takeover.
They were enriched very generously as a result, but at a cost so steep that even more than a century into the distant future, we could only ballpark the damage done.
Most priceless of the many things reappropriated from the entirety of most everyone, even the world leaders soon turned into puppets by Germany and Japan and later Japan when having been covertly yet aggressively continuing to militarize even prior to the end of the war, turned on its faithful ally without remorse or mercy.

Freedom.

The world became a fascist collectivism.
Imagination was dead. Childhood as was once celebrated as the fondest time in every child's life as it was once known, ceased to exist as Japan forced each and every citizen kept stringently under its control to adopt its ideals and aesthetics.

You perhaps now better understand the reasoning behind the rather intricate yet repetitive patterns our hunters often grandiosely adorned their living spaces and other administrations with.
Japanese became the international language in place of English.
The only kinds of media coverage permitted became propaganda to reinforce the already stifling supremacy the Japanese empire proceeded to grip the globe tighter and tighter in, never content.

All these authoritarian regimes in which the very concept of equality became foreign and unless you belonged to the state party even if you were born in the "pure" land of Japan life was a thoroughly miserable drag, led to the formation of an ultimate chain of businesses emerging with a bang some few decades prior to the impact.
A research facility that had been quickly gaining acclaim as an innovator of many world-changing breakthroughs especially in the fields of electronics and automation to allow unrivaled efficiency in all types of tasks from farming to manufacturing to power supply, shot almost overnight to the top flicking away even the Emperor and his court like they were pieces on a chessboard.
This shady corporation whose silver tongue won them unanimous support almost without effort: was NERV. A snake in the grass that wanted to take the ideal of absolute power and push it to infinity and beyond.

To rob every one of their NERV'S to combine mankind into a single NERV, so to speak so as not to even offer the possibility of free choice to anyone.

Being so prominent a superpower at the time of the Impact that doomed humanity, they were also the only people who had access to the sole weapon that stood any chance of stopping the Angels.
The Evangelion.
These were biomechanical devices constructed of the most advanced technology NERV permitted, requiring a young child as a pilot prior to the age of maturity, whose not fully formed mind had been subjected to the most primordial horror a tender soul of their young age could have the tear-jerking horror of witnessing.
The loss of one of their parents, one of the duo that bestowed them the sacred gift of life and for that same parent's inner essence also known as their soul to be extracted and placed into the Evangelion that would then and only then follow their depraved child's every order.

Most of the time anyway. Reports of Evangelion pilots being instead consumed by insanity as they slowly choked to death inside the boiling confines of their half living, half machine killer devices were not exactly uncommon.
The Evangelions were notorious for their mechanical unpredictability that made them incredibly dangerous at both ends.

The young heroes forcibly nominated against their wills for this patriotic duty, were given the patronizing honorific "the children" along with a number denoting the order in which they came into this traumatizing line of work in which an acid bath would most likely have been preferable.
First child. Second Child. Third child and counting.
Forced by one motive or another to risk their lives in defense of their race against a mess their superiors made.

It was speculated that how even at the time of the impact, NERV controlled so much of the world's resources and had advanced so far in the arms race to keep itself ahead of its competitors that it was unlikely the Evangelions were the most effective solution they could have implemented.
There were unconfirmed reports of less risky and more humane alternatives such as Jet alone being worked on by other big-name arms companies, only to be just as quickly dismissed in favor of continued use of the Evangelions for reasons flimsy at best.
No one dared say anything, but it was a common dark rumor that NERV were secretly involved in the sabotage of any possible improvement to the Evangelions which would not only relieve the child workers under their command of their life-risking duties, but also drive out the Angels with far greater ease to rebuild mankind under a new leadership.
Why they would do such a foolish thing, as one of my favorite sayings goes, no one knows for sure.

The impact did more than just ruin humanity to give rise to the new masters of this world.
The toxic fumes unleashed by the impact were deadly to humans, but highly beneficial to much other life that the Angels did not exhibit as much hatred towards.
For such life, the bloodsucking leeches among them, the deadly cloud only added to their size and strength till even they could no longer be deemed harmless to us and our survival. For they were very eager to turn on us, tired of being stepped on.

The Angels loved the stench of pollution and decay.
It was what drew them to this planet and the sole reason they were able to survive so well here despite its subtle differences to wherever they came from.
But what they enjoyed most of all was a feast on the two most poisonous emotions only humans of all species had developed capacity to feel.
Hatred and greed, which only we as the sole living beings who had developed not only sentience but sapience exhibited in our thoughts and actions even in the best of us.
They were part of what made us only human after all.

For this reason, the Angels placed humans at the top of their menu. That, and the mutual hatred out of the shared belief only they or us could be in charge of this world as its masters. In this way, we were to the Angels as sheep and cattle were to us.

The most terrifying part of all this however, was that the Angels had the power to absorb what they ate, to take on aspects in the personality of their meals.
Which meant that while the first Angel invaders were little more than thoughtless animals interested only in finding their next feeding ground, by now they had gained enough of us from eating enough of us to begin to mimic some of our behaviors.

Mostly our negative ones like being glued to a television screen unable to function without as was the case with the inhabitants of pale city Chihrio told me she found out about.
Or the compulsive urge for tidiness and disposing of every little speck of rubbish that looked the slightest out of place.
I had encountered this phenomenon myself with my battle with the Janitor in which I and several Nomes I had given myself the responsibility of protecting as my friends, narrowly escaped with our lives. The crude human masks many of them chose to sport were no coincidence.
They knew they were not human but from constant feasting on humans, they had taken on traits of them. It was also their cruel way of mocking us. Trying to tell us that they were watching our TV's, raiding our food stores, living in our homes with our appearances.
That the world no longer needed us for they would take care of the civilization we took thousands of years of hard work to build in our stead.

How now they were the sirs and madams with the luxury of the nice houses and fancy cruise ships, and we were the bothersome rats that needed to be caught in a trap and shipped to the slaughterhouse.
I know these things because of the late nights in my youth spent perusing the collection of books in the monastery especially when I was not able to fall asleep at night.
Though I could not take them with me when I left home, my memories of the historical tales were kept alive at the request of my friends to retell them as stories around the campfire over and over again which I never got tired of.
Even now, I continue to recite them in the company of myself even knowing there is no one to hear me.

There is great truth to be learned in the trials and tribulations of the past. Of the rise and fall of the many human civilizations before humanity itself was one day ruined.
I called it, the dynastic cycle.
How a new leader would always rise to overthrow an old leader who was no longer meeting the needs of his nation only to be overthrown himself when he fell victim to the same flaws.
It was not shocking. It was a natural part of life that had happened many times before and would continue as long as there were stars in the sky.
To put it in a simpler manner you might better understand: cruel leaders were replaced only to have new leaders who turn cruel.