Leliel

https://evangelion.fandom.com/wiki/Leliel

Leliel (レリエル?) (Hebrew: ליליאל) is the 12th Angel. Leliel only appears in the TV series. It is preceded by Ireul and succeeded by Bardiel.

Leliel is an extremely bizarre entity that exists in a pocket-dimension explained only by higher-order physics theories (abstract mathematics). Initially, Leliel appears to be a floating sphere with a warped, black and white color pattern that suddenly appears over Tokyo-3. However, Leliel's real body is actually what appears to be a shadow on the ground. The manifestation of Leliel's body in our dimension is 680 meters wide but only 3 nanometers thick; the floating sphere is just the "shadow" it casts in our dimension. Because it possess an inverted A.T. Field, it can absorb any material from our dimension inside of its body, within which is a Dirac Sea.

All three Evangelion Units are deployed against Leliel when it first appeared over Tokyo-3. Shinji charged ahead and fired at the floating sphere, thinking it was the Angel's real body, only to be sucked down into Leliel's real shadow-body which resulted in all communication being lost. Asuka barely escaped being sucked into Leliel as well, avoiding it by climbing onto a building. Rei fired several shots at the floating sphere with Unit-00's large sniper rifle, but this only succeeded in damaging nearby buildings.

NERV pulled back its forces, and Ritsuko explained the bizarre nature of the Angel. She proposed a plan whereby Unit-00 and Unit-02 would neutralize Leliel's A.T. Field with their own, and then the JSSDF would drop the remaining 992 N² bombs into its body. This would hopefully kill the Angel as well as recover Unit-01, regardless of whether in the process the plan would end up killing Shinji or not.

Against Misato's protests, Ritsuko's plan was given the go-ahead. Just as Unit-01's maximum life-support power time limit was reached, 16 hours later, the plan was about to be put into effect. However, just then the Eva went into "berserker mode" and despite having its battery power totally drained, savagely tore its way out of Leliel's body in a shower of blood, which also shattered its real shadow-body on the ground.

While within the Angel, Shinji experiences a bizarre internal psycho-analysis. It was in fact Leliel trying to contact Shinji's mind, not the Evangelion. Misato is actually directly asked about the possibility of Leliel trying to contact Shinji's mind in the following episode by SEELE, and she says it cannot really be determined what happened. Because most Eva fans have already seen evidence of Angels contacting Eva pilots (Episodes 22/23), it is probably safe to say that it was Leliel contacting Shinji's thoughts.

Kazuya Tsurumaki's interview in the Evangelion Theatrical Program makes it explicit: Shinji's younger self is, or was meant to be, Leliel talking to him. He says the following- "However, amidst the flow of the mysteries surrounding the Angels gradually being resolved, we decided to insert an episode where an Angel appeared to take an interest in humans. The first draft of the scenario was actually a dialog between Shinji and the Angel. However, we felt it would be too anti-climactic to have an Angel start talking like some pulp fiction alien (speaks while tapping his Adam's apple with his hand) "Your analog mode of thought is incorrect." So we came up with the idea actually used in this episode, which was to have Shinji converse with himself."

In addition, Leliel's striped appearance visually corresponds with the younger Shinji's striped shirt. In fact, Leliel‘s ”fake” body actually has a face, with stripes in the pattern of two bulging eyes, and a small mouth with sharp jaws. This face appears multiple times on its body.