Episode 20 · Fafner

Fafner

On Tatsumiyajima, the middle island of a tiny cluster out in the backwater of the Japanese isles, nothing much ever happens. Kids bike to school, salt air, quiet evenings. They've been told their whole lives that the peace will hold. It won't. The shelters kept them safe for years while the rest of humanity was being wiped out by the Festum, alien things that don't want to kill people so much as absorb them into one single shared existence. Then the barrier breaks. And the only ones who can climb into the giant machines called Fafners and fight back are the children themselves, engineered long before any of them were born to be the last hope of the human race. They didn't sign up for this. They were grown for it. Now teenagers who were supposed to be worrying about exams are strapped into cockpits, holding the final line while something incomprehensible tries to swallow what's left of mankind. How do you tell a kid that their entire life was a preparation for a war they never chose?