Noah

Noah is never depicted. The novels invoke him strictly by name, a long-dead founder spoken of in second-hand accounts, and no likeness or description of him survives in the text.

The character has no recorded voice or temperament of his own. What the novels attach to his name is legacy: he stands at the origin point of SEELE's mission of preserving the record of every failed world.

The Kaji-vessel supplies everything known about Noah. After a SEELE relic embeds itself in Kaji's head and the organization claims his body, the vessel tells Kensuke Aida that he carries inherited memories of previous worlds and that his task is steering the Human Instrumentality Project clear of old mistakes. He cannot say how many bearers came before him, only that Noah stood first among them.

Reunited with Misato and Kensuke during the fighting at the Valley of Human Bodies, the vessel explains that Instrumentality has already failed in this world, and that Armaros exists as a safety mechanism that ends each failed humanity and restarts the cycle until completion. In an age long past, he says, humanity received the command to raise an Ark, a work that opened a small share of higher techniques to mankind; SEELE began there, and Noah was its founding member.

The fifth volume adds that SEELE has guarded the world's memory since the first Noah's time, keeping records of every failure despite never reaching success, learning to interfere with the messengers, and crafting the Ark to speed new worlds into being. The vessel shares all of this freely, reasoning that Armaros will erase everything anyway, leaving no time to act on the knowledge.