It could have stood to be fleshed into an entr'acte, but that would have caused other narrative problems, chief among them the fact that he appears in "Bagatelle No. 3 in F Minor" - making a separate story showing something that happened to him between Bagatelles No. 1 and No. 3 a bit awkward, to say the least. So, it ended up getting left out altogether.

	Corwin Ravenhair was a young man in a thoroughly foul mood as
he trudged through Jezebel's orbital spaceport station, pack on his
back.  Theoretically, he was looking for passage to New Avalon from
one of the charter pilots who were refueling and getting ready to head
back out after dropping off well-heeled resort patrons, but it had to
be admitted that he wasn't looking very hard.  In order for him to
actually notice a spacer willing to take him where he needed to go, he
would basically have had to walk right into her.
	This he proceeded to do, colliding heavily with a person
wearing an EVA softsuit who was just emerging from one of the side
airlock corridors.  Corwin let out a sharp grunt as part of the EVA
suit's backpack dug painfully into a tender spot; the wearer of the
suit made a soft, startled noise and took a couple of skipping steps
forward before turning.  Neither fell.
	They regarded each other for a second, both taking stock of
their persons to make sure nothing had been dropped or exchanged, and
then Corwin apologized.
	His victim was quite obviously a woman, petite and well-shaped
in one of those snug-fitting softsuits that were all the rage these
days for light extra-vehicular duty - the kind made of several layers
of the super-resilient polymer developed for Mobile Trace datafilms,
with a compact life-support backpack, various standard fittings, and a
visored hood added for atmospheric integrity.  This particular one was
white, with black inserts on the insides of the arms, a few dashes of
safety orange, and a couple of green metallic bits along the upper
curve of the ribcage whose function Corwin could not immediately
discern.
	Softsuits, originally developed for the use of Destroid
pilots, permitted much greater agility and dexterity than conventional
hard spacesuits, which was handy for making repairs to spacecraft and
whatnot.  Corwin wouldn't want to get hit by a micrometeorite or an
10,000-mile-an-hour paint fleck while wearing one, but then, that kind
of thing was no fun in a hardshell suit either.
	The woman tilted her head thoughtfully as she regarded him
through the visor of her hood.  The hood was a full-head affair - it
had to be, for obvious reasons - which rather resembled a white
plastic balaclava fitted with a tinted ski visor and a breather mask.
Behind the visor, all Corwin could see was a pair of wide eyes, their
color indeterminate through the smoked plastic.
	After a moment's thoughtful silence, she reached up to her
throat and tabbed the control which released the breathing mask,
causing the hood to release its snug memory-material grip on her head.
Then she unsealed the visor and slid it up onto her forehead, in the
process peeling off the whole headpiece, visor, mask, and all, leaving
the lot to hang down behind her neck like a sweatshirt hood.
	To Corwin's surprise, she wasn't so much a woman as a girl,
probably in her mid-teens by his eyeball estimate, with a slightly
shaggy pageboy bob of blue-silver hair, very pale skin, and delicate
facial features dominated by a pair of wide, blood-red eyes.
	The eyes regarded Corwin calmly from under surprisingly,
contrastingly dark lashes as he stared at her, trying to figure out
why she looked so familiar; then her lips quirked in a little smile.
	"Hello, Corwin," she said in a soft voice.
	Corwin blinked and stared at her for a three-count more, and
then he found his voice.
	"Rei?" he murmured.
	Her smile widened just a tiny bit more, but she said nothing.
	Sheer delight replaced the incredulity on Corwin's face,
breaking away the mask of dour glumness that had settled on it like
concrete since he'd said his goodbyes on Jezebel and the Valiant.
	"REI!" he cried, then threw his arms around her.  She made a
very soft surprised sound (the kind which would be rendered in a comic
book by a large speech balloon containing only a tiny exclamation
point) as Corwin, who overtopped her by more than a foot and probably
doubled her weight, bear-hugged her.
	Half an hour later, Corwin sat in the combination bar/cafe on
the station's concourse, waiting.  Though the planetside resort was
opulent by any standard, the orbital station was rather short on
frills.  It was really just the outer-space equivalent of a truck
stop.
	The resort didn't even operate the station.  It was provided
by the division of GENOM Corporation which owned and operated the
system's metaspace jumpgate.  Resort patrons never boarded the station
itself; it was there to serve Jezebel's charter pilots.
	Because the station was operated by GENOM, Corwin supposed it
was more or less inevitable that the cafe on board would be a Chet's
Chow location.  He didn't care for Chet's as much as some of his
friends did, but it didn't offend him either.  He sat now at a corner
table, bemusedly taking in the decor.  This particular Chet's was set
up with a sort of "simulated Star Destroyer docking bay" theme going
on, complete with a TIE fighter suspended from the wall like a
gigantic metal fishing trophy.
	Corwin's table was under this odd exhibit, so if he tilted his
head back, he had a commanding view of the underbelly.  This
distracted him momentarily, since it appeared, on closer inspection,
to be an actual starfighter; he had expected it to be a plastic
decoration.
	Well, he mused, I suppose it stands to reason.  It's not like
it would have -cost- them anything.
	He pulled himself away from that train of thought and tried to
think of something constructive instead.
	Rei.
	Corwin hadn't seen Rei Ayanami since he was six years old, and
now he was trying to remember what he knew about her.  On the whole,
it didn't amount to much.  She was one of the people his father had
brought home from an Experts of Justice mission, in the early days of
the International Police, before the organization got so big that the
Chief was too busy to go into the field more than very rarely.
	That kind of thing had happened a few times - Gryphon and the
other early Experts would break up some kind of operation, usually one
of Big Fire's plots, and there'd be somebody staying at their house or
MegaZone's, or across the street at the Roses', for a period of time
ranging from a few days to a few years.
	In Rei's case, it was years.  She'd lived with the Roses, but
had spent a lot of time at Corwin's father's house, because she'd
become a student of the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, the family sword
style.  Corwin remembered her as a nice but quiet girl, often rather
sad - shy and at the same time oddly unselfconscious.
	Other than that, he couldn't say he really knew her.  He had
no idea where she came from or how she came to be involved in whatever
case of Gryphon's she'd been involved in.  All the same, he'd been
rather fond of her, and sad when she packed her bags one day and
disappeared from their lives.  She wrote to Marty Rose or his father
sometimes, but apart from that, she might have disappeared from the
universe.  Given that that was more or less what he was about to do,
he found her sudden rematerialization oddly encouraging.
	He noted motion and looked up from his reverie to see her
coming into the restaurant.  He blinked, then smiled slowly and took
her in as she scanned the restaurant and started toward his table. 
	In his admittedly-fuzzy memories of her from the old days, Rei
was always dressed in workout clothes from a session in the dojo,
sometimes traditional kendo garb, sometimes not.  She had owned other
clothes, but they had been so anonymous that they'd made no lasting
impression on the young Corwin's memory.
	Her dress now was nothing in particular to write home about
either, but it was so different from his mental image of her that
Corwin had to smile.  She was wearing black military-surplus trousers,
the slightly baggy kind with a lot of pockets, a grey ribbed tank top
that fit her trim figure snugly, a short black jacket with the sleeves
rolled up, and the smallest pair of Doc Martens Corwin had ever seen.
There was a freelance spacer's utility belt settled on her slender
hips.  Corwin's quick once-over identified an old-fashioned Cybergenix
communicator, a grapple pack, a multitool, a couple of the most
commonly needed sizes of turbospanners, and a blaster pistol made from
a sawed-off Bryar C-16 carbine.
	The full effect should have been a bit butch, but she was so
small and delicate-looking that it was instead oddly charming.
Indeed, Corwin found that very odd.  He'd failed to recognize her
partly because of the age of his memories of her, and partly because
he had unconsciously discarded the match he'd received the first time
on the grounds that Rei couldn't possibly look the way he remembered
her now.  She was several years older than he was, and so would be in
her mid-twenties today.
	Instead, she looked, except for her clothes, just as he
remembered her - small and slim, fine-boned, with modest but
harmonious proportions.  (Corwin suddenly recalled, with a slight
reddening of his cheeks, that Rei was the first female he'd ever seen
naked.)  She dressed and carried herself like a grown woman now, but
put her in a school uniform and she could easily have passed for a
classmate of Corwin's younger half-sister Priss Morgan, or possibly
even a grade or two below her.
	She smiled very slightly as she slipped into the seat across
from him.  A complete stranger to her would probably have missed it,
and Corwin's familiarity with her was rusty enough that he only just
noticed it himself.  He wondered what had prompted it, then realized
his face was still a bit warm.
	"I've changed a little, haven't I?" she asked, and her voice
was just the same - soft, pitched low, but not so low that he had
difficulty hearing her.
	"Just a little," he replied.  "But not as much as I would have
thought... "
	She nodded.  "I have Edgerton's Syndrome," she said matter-of-
factly.
	Corwin cocked his head, interested.  "So you're a Detian."
	"Apparently so."
	"Acquired or inherited?" Corwin wondered.
	"I wish I knew," Rei replied, but before they could get into
that or anything else, a waitress appeared with menus.
	"So," said Rei once the waitress had taken their orders and
departed.  "Why are you here, and not with the Valiant?"
	Corwin thought about it for a second, then shrugged and just
told her, half out of perversity toward Frey's precious security
level, half out of plain curiosity about how she would react.
	Rei's reaction was slightly disappointing.  She just nodded
and said, "So you need transportation to New Avalon."
	Corwin nodded.  "And without regular service out here yet,
I'll have to charter a flight, at least as far as Babylon 6, if I can
find somebody going my way."  He took a drink from his glass of water.
"So what are -you- doing here?"
	Rei smiled slightly.
	"Going your way," she said.

From there, had this thread been followed further, we'd have been introduced to Rei's ship, the Cipher Zero (an ExoSal Model CX-93 Avenger-class freighter), and HK-47. There would've been a sequence for the Knights of the Old Republic fans in which Corwin used his Repair skill to give HK a couple points of DEX back, following which the ship would've been waylaid by an Earthforce patrol ship and boarded. ("Delighted statement: Boarder repulsion protocol activated!") After fighting off the boarded and making their escape, our heroes would obviously have made it to New Avalon, parting with promises not to let more than 10 years go by between contacts again.

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>

Now I'm visualizing the EPU studios green room, and Dennis MacCrofton saying, "You've got to be faster than that if you want to fall on Rei correctly..." followed by a pillow to the face.

Peter Eng
--
I'm only a Charter Member because of the DCForum upgrade, and because there's no rank below "Clueless F!wit."

Ah, the intro to Rei we should have gotten. Yeah, I can see your problems with the scene and fitting it in, but doggonnit, it would have been nice to see. Especially after all the teases we'd had about Rei and what she was up to in the past.

Thanks for rescuing this off the cutting room floor and sharing. too bad you dont have something where you can place little shorts like this that dont really fit elsewhere.