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"Nakai, what do you think the purpose of this school is?"
"To train mecha pilots, of course."
"Wrong," Captain Mutou said. "If we wanted to do that, we would have used a military academy. Look around you, Nakai," he said, gesturing broadly to the school as a whole. "This school is about giving you a future beyond fighting the ANIMA. Think about it this way. If we expected you all to do this for the rest of your lives, would we bother with so much effort?"
Our moment of contemplation is immediately ruined by the sound of a loud klaxon and flashing red lights. "Scramble warning, Nakai," Mutou says, putting his uniform cap back on. "Let's go to work."
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RHYTHMIA. A strange word. An ugly word.
The first cases of it were recorded shortly after the first of the ANIMA invasions, shortly before I was born. We're still not sure what it is, but it attacks the nervous system.
In some cases, like Shizune's it attacked the aural centers of the brain, rendering one deaf and mute. Lilly was hit with a strain that attacked her optic nerves, leaving her blind. In other cases, the nerve damage resulted in necrosis, requiring amputation of the affected limbs. In other cases, like Hanako's, it rendered a portion of her body insensate. Unable to feel anything.
Not every child was affected, of course. For a long time, my parents and I thought I was one of the lucky ones. As it turned out, RHYTHMIA had attacked my heart instead. It first manifested itself on one snowy day when another RHYTHMIA carrier, Iwanako, confessed to me.
You see, RHYTHMIA isn't just a virus. It's some sort of quantum entanglement phenomenon. Emotional and spiritual closeness allows two carriers of the disease to create a kind of space-time feedback loop. The resulting nexus, or Synchronicity, is what makes RHYTHMIA patients so important to the war.
Because only two RHYTHMIA carriers working in tandem can pilot the God-Machines that fight the war against the ANIMA.
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I was going to write more, with Lieutenant Satou being transferred to AVALON base, and Misha reflecting on the fact that Hisao and Shizune make a better pilot team than she and Shizune ever were, and maybe Emi not wanting to get close to Hisao because her last partner had been killed in battle, but I think that would be putting too much work into a silly idea.
That post was completely silly and even he knows it. xD
