[https://i.imgur.com/LYtGYe4.jpg]

AN: Some artwork, above. Fairly large.

***

Taylor was sitting under a tree. The rage had burned out and left her empty. Quiet for the first time in weeks because she was always doing something, anything to escape. To escape her captivity. What a joke. She wasn’t running from them, or the calm sea would not bother her so.

She’d come here, After. After she’d stopped hiding and plotting and pretending. After she’d screamed and screamed and demanded answers until she got them. After they beat her half to death and she was still screaming. After it finally dawned on them that something was wrong. After she’d gotten the answers. After she’d seen how they looked at her and each other now. After.

Here she’d stayed, in a bubble of silence, all her own. Even the Imps were quiet. She woken here, the first time. The first time she was really an Abyssal, not the dead shade of a woman walking around in Abyssal flesh. She remembered those early days. The confusion, the abuse. Always the abuse. It wasn’t an excuse. That the society was beyond fucked up. But it was an explanation. She could see it. Now.

Days after. After she died and Taylor was still here.

She should have bent her neck. Not because they would break it, because they never had. She’d recovered enough to understand that. She’d come out of the fight to end all fights and once on the other side, with a welcome like that? She’d kept fighting. She pretended to submit, while planning how to get out. Everything she’d done since coming here had been in service to trying to get out. Trying to steal scraps of knowledge that they didn’t even know she was missing.

And all along they could see right through her because she wasn’t entirely there, but they couldn’t see her. They’d seen the ship they expected her to be. She’d known nothing about her new people. They had known nothing of her. And they were people.

She behaved like she was trapped, enslaved. In a way she was. But the bonds were not of slaves. Taylor was in debt. Debt to her benefactors. It was fucked up that they thought this kind of treatment to be favor, but she was coming to understand that her new people were vicious, vicious, super-powered children at war. With no parents and bad instincts.

Was it any wonder they’d turned into monsters? Did it excuse anything? Not really. But that debt was not so large. Especially at the start. With a few months, a year of service? She could have been free. Possibly rich as well.

But somewhere along the way she lucked into a partner. One that had her over a barrel and used it to ask her to save them both. Oh she was a tough girl, independent. Taylor was reminded of Imp a bit. Aisha, had she lived? She didn’t know. She’d gotten most of her memory back, but there were holes, towards the end. If she had allowed Panacea to mess with her brain, it was a wonder she could remember anything. As if to compensate, her childhood was never closer, clearer. Abyssal health coverage, who would have thought?

A sad laugh breached the silence, before it flowed back in. Suffocating. She’d come here, after panicking over her rigging. Oh God, that was actually kind of funny in retrospect. Taylor had made plans. How to break her escorts. Especially after the first Air attack. She just needed to build up a bit more. She’d managed to study the Imps enough to draw up plans for them, and traded a Walkman player hardened for water along with a collection of music to a sub tender for High Speed Torpedo blueprints. It was funny, where her head was. She had several rooms emptied on board where she’d hung all her plans and blueprints. With the manuals, it was the start of a Library. Mom would have been proud.

Dad? Less so. Her engineers were makeshift and not worth the title of Regulars. They still had a long way to go and their trade was producing machines to kill. “Training technical crew always takes longer” was written in an ugly scrawl on the sidelines of the manual. Except it wasn’t an ugly scrawl. It was childish. Because no one ever taught them how to write.

Taylor had planned to murder them. To wait until the next time bombers came. She could see it play out. Squirrel away a few more torpedo boats, hide them among the cargo. Build them entirely in secret on board, no one would know. Arm them and loose them into the chaos. She was usually near the middle. From there? Sink them all from ambush. Then she’d be free and they’d have gotten what they deserved. Death.

She really was far too fond of killing children. And the Abyss didn’t care. It just hungered. She’d been hurt from day one, it had been easy to hate. Much easier then it ever was Before. Like there was a hole where her heart should be and hate was junk food. Bad for you, but filling. It had taken the death of her partner to get her here. Out of it. Where she could stop and see. Admit to herself a simple truth. She’d planned to kill others and shared it. She’d planned to rob Midway and told her. Because she needed her. Because she had no one else to talk to.

And it was… tiny. Un-important. Looking back, her memories were bloated with suffering and indignities. Every hour spent together another chance for her to vent, unimportant next to her all reaching plans and eternal suffering. When she didn’t even know how to speak without sounding like a Merchant. When she’d spoken treason and it hadn’t been repeated to anyone since she still had her head.

Her hand drifted into the shallows. Where a sub had sneaked in every night she could. To rest near her, leaving a furrow in the soft corrals. She was always gone before Taylor woke up, but her sonar was peerless. She was the ship who could see anything, but was blind to the obvious. That was almost funny enough to cry.

Itchy and Scratch didn’t speak. They merely shifted, keeping themselves between her and the stomping feet. They were good girls. Some girl, a heavy cruiser, came stomping through the shallow surf. No. Taylor looked up. She wasn’t stomping. She was the opposite of stomping. She was walking on eggshells, gingerly. Taylor looked around and felt the silence engulfing the island. She’d grown used to the feel of radar returns bouncing off her sides. Midway was silent. So when the girl walked up, scowling, and started waving her arms, she was confused for a moment. Yet she’d grown sensitive enough to know not to ask out loud.

It took her a moment to look past the girl and see her waving signal flags. V, Victor. She didn’t need a manual for that one. She’d drilled her crew enough to know it by heart.

“I require assistance.”

Slowly, Taylor stood up. The water slid off her. There were no drops, no plops. A moment after standing up she was bone dry. She eyed it for a moment, before looking at the heavy cruiser. She didn’t know what she looked like. She didn’t care. The scowl slid off its face in an instant. Slowly, it held out a hand. She held out a hand. Taylor looked her in the eye and took it. They walked back to the lagoon, in silence.

***

She was delivered to her overseer Ra-class. Whose name she hadn’t bothered to learn since she was the enemy. The repair ship looked harried and relived to see her. She slowly signaled:

“S.E.W. .F.I.N.E. .H.A.N.D.?.“

The air felt heavier here. The storm above was entirely absent. No, it was so large the eye had eaten the whole island, yet no thunder reached them. Her own people had fetched her flags. C, Charlie.

“Affirmative.”

There was something. A scent in the air. The Ra gave her a sheet to copy some complex drawing. She did. Even one handed, after all her practice with a needle? It was perfect. That won her a genuine smile. She could see it, because she wasn’t hiding anymore. Pretending. What was the point? It would work, or it wouldn’t. They gave her a book and a bunch of metal plates. Midway filled her inkpot herself. With Midway’s own blood.

The Ra kept an eye on her and showed her what to copy. She was one of only four ships here. Just her and the Ra’s, silently scribbling with blood on dark steel. Did it make sense? Did it have to, if it worked? Because she’d heard the muttering after. After. Before, she’d thought it bragging. Like someone saying they’d survived an Endbringer. “How many times have you seen your death?” was a popular game in the Abyss. The speakers would invent ever more embellished tales of how they’d died. Alien Taylor with her alien human thoughts. Watching and learning and understanding nothing.

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What was pain if you regenerated? Trauma if you could take a bath to make it go away? What was the value of life if you could regrow limbs and raise the dead? What morals if you loved to hate?

She didn’t know. She knew it didn’t have to be this. This ugly, sad excuse for a society that even the ancient Vikings the Empire idolized would have shunned. Angry children playing at life and war and death in a game that wasn’t one. How could she judge this anything but a massive waste.

***

Night had fallen and with it the silence had grown oppressive. The storm was raging above yet not one drop fell on Midway. Lightning flashed but no thunder violated the bubble around the island. Instead it was its passing, the moment where men were deafened, that echoed in its silence across the still pool the lagoon had become. Tiny waves barely stirring the surface. They gathered there, summoned by a call from beyond the real. Every shipgirl on Midway. Every Abyssal not holding down the fronts. Everyone who could come.

Plates painted in sigils simple and complex, beautiful and disturbing were positioned across the island and the lagoon. Placed in trees, buried at the shore, floating in the still sea. Some surrounding and in piles of materials, forming some complex, arcane pattern beyond her understanding. Each final position checked by Midway herself, precise to a level that would make a Tinker blush.

She waited in silence. They all did. Taylor had a plan. It was very simple, straightforward. Only six steps. What she should have done if she’d known, seen. If she’d accepted that she was like them and they were like her. That she was people and so were they. Monsters and people, all of them.

Midway came first, out of the rows of shipgirls, to the very edge of the sea. Not in her shorts and blouse. She came in her rigging, calm and radiant. Her eyes were like an eruption beneath the waves, burning, shining red. Her dress was bone white and flowing, massive and spread out, entirely hiding her feet. The monstrous teeth floated above an expanse of pale flesh, her shoulders free. Black ruffles engulfed her hands at the tips of her sleeves. Her hair was wild, falling in long tresses almost to the sands.

She came with the island on her back. It was towering, made up of innumerable factories. Peppered with cannons and airfields. Fighters, bombers, a river of living steel ready to wash away her enemies. A Princess in her home, surrounded by fleets and at the height of her power as midnight approached on an island that held a sea on which no voice had spoken from before the dawn. Two others broke from the ranks, mighty and towering in their own right, but Taylor had eyes only for the conductor.

Taylor was at the front, a few steps back from the water. Numerous Wa-Class transports were arranged in rows behind and around her. She wasn’t sure if it was a position of honor or the place where she was least likely to disturb the event. The magic. The heavy cruiser that had come to fetch her was right next to her, keeping a wary eye on her, but she didn’t care. She hoped it was magic, because it would take something as that to grant her wish.

A shadow, deeper then the black of the depths, slowly crawled from Midway, until it touched the surface as her ship clock struck midnight. There was a thrum in the beyond that made her hull ring as everyone around her flinched. Many voices rose, a sound that took sound instead of adding it, each a hum with its own unique pitch, a layer of Silence, an echo of that something that made them Abyssal. That made them, them.

More voices were joining in, as three clear notes led the song. In a few seconds everyone was humming and holding their own tone. A vicious elbow was headed for her ribs when she grabbed the arm and broke it, with ease. Because she had weight and skill. Who would teach an Abyssal hand to hand? For all the pain she could feel radiating from the ship next to her, not for a moment did the cruiser stop humming.

Taylor? She’d take the time to do it right. It was her first time after all. And she still wasn’t all there. That much was clear, here, now. Translucent, ghostly tendrils wrapped around her shoulder and down her stump, ending in three spiked prongs, each liberally covered in teeth on the inside and armored on the outside. There was more, but right now, did it matter?

She could hear the echo from that first pulse. That clear thrum. Her hull was echoing it, sending out its own tone that every one of her nightmares was starting to hum. All but one. The Wilted Lilly looked around her, checking her readings carefully before shrugging. Lily started humming too. That was one.

The snap of bone was swallowed by the Silence but Midway heard it anyway. How could she not when Taylor was walking on her sands? She saw the Harbor transition. It wasn’t movement. It was like Legend, or Strider. One instant she was looking at the center of the lagoon where a whirlpool was forming, the next her head snapped to her, as Taylor took an extra step forward. Two and three, to the very edge as the other two had. It was time to stop hiding and she’d learned something of custom carrying messages among the Installations. Of respect and courtesy as the Abyss understood it.

Give warning. That was two. With her position, with the ghosts around her, by drawing attention. Taylor started humming too. It was hard with her teeth. She’d never make pretty sounds. But this one? She felt like her throat and teeth were made for the silent howl that poured out of her lips in step three. A dozen transports behind her were blown from their feet and stuttered.

Fair is fair. Midway hardly blinked. The silent song shuddered for a moment. Taylor was no conductor, no master of choirs. But she could tell good music from amateur trash. Her introduction shook the whole edifice, turning one into the other. It was not ready for her. Yet their positions were deliberate. One for each side of the closed lagoon. One for each cardinal direction. Because even if she was still in denial Midway suspected and had for weeks, months. Ever since she’d had a taste and she’d kept it to herself. But her pride had not allowed her not to make contingencies. She abhorred shoddy work with every fiber of her being.

A plate was buried beneath each of the four. Taylor had helped bury them. It’s how she knew where to stand. In the moment she sang, the one beneath her was silent, dormant. Less than four heartbeats later Midway had re-arranged the flow of the whole piece and the magic plate beneath her was humming with her. That was four.

Nearly a dozen ships had moved to what must have been secondary positions to accomplish it, but Taylor only cared that the song was swelling again. She didn’t care. Didn’t care for Midway’s apocalyptic anger. Or the boundless shame that drowned it. Taylor only had eyes for the growing whirlpool. It grew and grew as the storm reflected it, clouds rolling in, the rain falling so thick it felt like they were all underwater.

It built and built until with a crescendo in the beyond it broke. It made the initial thrum feel like a love tap as sky and sea and depth became one as their spirits screamed into the black. Lightning thicker then buildings struck the sea, as underwater blasts seemed to lift the very sea into the heavens as the Abyss screamed. Plates and materials were washed away into that empty maw and as they fed it, it fed them.

A harsh scream ripped out of a girl on the far right as the carrier that had given Taylor her first plane broke ranks and ran for the sea. The instant she touched it, it spat her back out so fast she broke a dozen trees before rolling to a stop, dead to the world and missing both legs.

Taylor? She stepped into the storm. It owed her. Step Five. Mine!

***

Mom was sad again. Taylor was four but she was a big girl. But Mom was sad and she would fix it. She was a super-hero! So she sneaked up on her and saw some mean women had knocked the weaving from Mom’s hands and now she had to pick it up again, piece by piece, carefully pulling it out of the floor. It was all tangled. The other girls were mean, but the nice black floor had caught them. She patted the helpful floor. It gurgled back. She giggled, for the floor was funny, but that drew Mom’s attention. Oh, oh. Busted. Mom tilted her head at her and asked in a scary voice:

“What are you doing here little one?” she asked with a wide smile. It was very wide, like ear to ear!

“Um. I’m helping? Look, look!” she said, trying to gather the threads and give them to Mom but they kept tangling and slipping through her fingers. No fair! Her Mom made it look so easy. She had such big teeth.

“Look now, this is no place for a beginner. Why don’t you run along now? You know you shouldn’t be here.” the maybe not her Mom chided. And she would, she knew she shouldn’t be here, but she was on a mission.

“No! I have to find Shu.” she confessed. “She’s little and scared. I’m a superhero, it’s my job to protect her!” she proclaimed with all her heart. There was a spark of blue light, more imagined then seen.

The nice Lady seamstress pushed her a bit, carefully. Slowly making her leave. “But I don’t wanna!” she protested waving her hands. Oh. There was a thread stuck to her little finger. It was little and scared and just a bit blue. It was the only spot of color in the whole room. In that empty blackness. The Lady didn’t notice but when she tried to push Taylor out the thread pulled on the whole tangled clump and the Lady got really red in the face.

“Now listen, I’m really running out of patience, I’ve been very accommodating missy, now you… go… this… “ Her eyes fell on the line wrapped around Taylor’s pinky, running back to her weave. Wide eyes looked from one to the other. Slowly, gently, she pulled on the thread and watched it only latch onto Taylor all the harder, the tiny spot of color hidden from view.

“How did you… No, I can’t deal with you right now. You get one. You hear me. That one. Now GET OUT!” she screamed, as her nails flashed, sharp, sharp, sharp. Cutting Shu free.

***

Dozens of shapes exploded out of the sea as four women stepped into the storm. Two wove into and out of the surf, untouched by the black eating away at the world, collecting their subordinates as they surfaced. One waded into the center of the whirlpool, her strength, her home, holding open the way. She bargained with her God for the lives of others.

One stole her friend away while the God was distracted. She paid in love and blood, coming out of the storm with her dress in tatters, her cranes broken, bleeding from a dozen scrapes, but smiling so hard it hurt. In her hand, like a newborn, a Yo-Class submarine slept, whole and hale. She was met on that shore by the eyes of nearly a hundred ships. And none could meet hers.

Instead, a whisper answered her, cadenced and practiced. Rehearsed and trained. No, beaten into them. A hundred voices speaking a single truth:

“Only a Princess may touch the True Abyss” swore the choir of sea-monsters at war with humanity.

Sang little girls who couldn’t be older than seven. Both were true.

What worth life, what worth death? What price for resurrection? What would she give for her mother?

As she felt the little girl softly breathing against her, she was subjected to her whole skin crawling at how they now looked at her. How they weren’t even expecting punishment, they’d already accepted it was inevitable. Her revenge, impossible to escape, just delay.

She laughed, happy yet bitter. For she’d hidden this fearing the reaction, the life and death struggle and they worshiped her for it and it made her sick to her core!

This Earth, this life… Wonder upon horror upon wonder upon horror.

Taylor was done with this for today. Step Six, rescue Shun, done.

She’d deal with everything tomorrow when she could sit Shun down to ask her all the things she should have asked weeks ago. She felt eyes everywhere, like the entire island was boring into her. Midway trying to drill a hole in her back from the center of the lagoon, atop a dissipating whirlpool. She could still feel the echo of all that rage, betrayal and shame. Midway could take a number and stand in line. She needed to sleep off this massive headache.

Actually. Step Seven: Get a real bath. That would be nice.

Taylor walked off with a spring in her step.