Taylor had been through a lot in her new life. She might not remember everything about the old one, but she felt pretty confident that it too was eventful. This still topped the charts for pure surreal for both lives. She’d had horrible experiences, but never something like this. Innocent but utterly unreal. She left like someone should check she wasn’t drunk, but knew she hadn’t had anything. It has started innocently.

It was breakfast time. She, as the workhorse of the convoy had extra supplies for everyone, but they should have each had internal storage. She certainly did, which gave a new meaning to body fat. Instead, they expected her to cook for them and had arranged, in their wisdom, to add to her load several things to do it with. Supplies that were common for other tender ships. Though on bringing it up, they’d snuck unsure looks at her chest, which did nothing to help her confidence.

She’d started looking through her mental map of cargo looking for the equipment they were talking about and blushed at some of the stuff there. Whoever had packed these things had been unsure what model to get her, so with her space, they’d thrown in several. Some of which couldn’t work the way she though they did. In any case, she found one she felt would work for her and started pulling stuff out.

First came the counter top. It still felt odd to pull objects that obviously couldn’t fit out of her skirts, but having a dress that was bigger on the inside was nice. She found the proper attachment points and connected two corners to her corset, the outer rigid layer working for her, clipping them to her pockets. She wasn’t sure how other girls did it, but this model was meant for tenders with cranes, so the suspended lines worked just fine and attached to her hooks with no issue, leaving the countertop fairly horizontal. No, it was nearly perfectly horizontal, almost as wide as her bell dress and a bit longer than her forearm.

Then she picked out a large pot from a wide selection that she was pretty sure dwarfed what her kitchen had in a past life. Pouring a whiff of fuel into the hotplate built into the left side of the countertop and lighting it finished her preparations. The middle held a cutting board and the right indents to leave ingredients.

The positioning wasn’t ideal, she had to be careful with her arm not to jostle the pot, but weeks in the kitchen cooking with one arm and a crane, and then both cranes, did her in good stead. Finally, she dropped all the ingredients into the pot and set it to a low broil. Cleaning the fresh fish she’d packed for the road had been a bit difficult but now all she had to do was wait for it to finish.

Oh, and run. Well, jog. Like she had been. The whole time. Through it all.

Because apparently she could just do that now. And it was messing with her head something fierce. She was a girl. She was a ship. A girl could not run and cook. It was impossible. Period. Even with powers. Even if one such hero existed, why would they ever do it? A ship? It was normal to make chow on a deployment. Mundane. She was a big ship, made for the ocean and the storm.

These calm waters? Barely moved her deck. Which translated into the girl. Taylor was jogging, hard. Not quite running, because no matter her will, she could actually run with this might weighing her down. But no matter the motion of her legs, almost nothing above her hips was moving. She could set out and have a tea party, talk about those dreadful commoners while running, and it would look like she was just gliding across the sea without a care in the world if you didn’t look below her hemline.

This clash of girl and ship was seriously sending her mind spinning. That’s not how any of it works. She knew that, she’d ran regularly, she knew how her body moved and reacted and this? This felt wrong. The motion was there, but the feedback was subtly off and it was like a half-healed wound, itching at her. Between her instincts telling her everything was fine and her memories and reflexes telling her something was terribly off.

She hadn’t noticed before, because she’d never ran this long. But once she got a rhythm going, she’d discovered that being at sea was boring and wondering if her preparations were enough had her checking everything so she’d noticed and now she mind couldn’t stop picking at it. The broth finished cooking so she packed everything away but the pot and lowered her patrol boats. The imps would hold out a bowl above their heads, letting her pour, then run off to deliver the meals.

The superiors ate first of course and the patrol torpedo boats were most suited to avoiding the perils of her shoals. Bruce carried his orders with solemn care, Judy just wanted it over quick so she could go back to sunbathing on her deck and Bentley was very enthusiastic. So much so that Taylor feared if her broth wasn’t so thick and nearly glued to the bowl, he would have spilled it all over. And if one of her pets spilled Sapphire’s food she’d regret it when they stopped. Taylor was just glad to avoid the beating and not disappoint her Flag.

And let’s talk about that. Because it was a thing she noticed as the hours rolled by. Even as the destroyers made a game of weaving in and out of her shoals, providing entertainment to go with the meal and a few braver cruisers joined in, Taylor was growing increasingly suspicious. Sapphire was keeping comms up. Receiving and giving regular orders, course adjustments and updates. Check-ins and readiness status reports. It was subtle, it was insidious, but after hours of looking for it she had it. Every time she addressed or included Taylor she felt a tiny little burst. A nudge. That the Flag was looking at her, asking about her, ordering her.

It was cleanest with the orders. She found herself moving, obeying before she could think about it. By instinct. She was the Flag, and the Flag had ordered it. Spending days, weeks, under that effect? Training, conditioning her? With no sleep, no rest? That was messed up and insidious as all hell. She wasn’t sure if she would have noticed it at all if a small fraction of her wasn’t very violently opposed every time she got an order.

One of her engines felt like it wanted to jump out of her throat and strangle the bitch every time she ordered Taylor and that wasn’t normal. All that time on Midway she’d felt nothing like this. It had started her looking. It’s how she noticed “The Flag” effect. It was even like that in her head. She wasn’t sure when the effect started, but it said a lot about the Abyss. Trying to connect to that spark of defiance was a bad, bad idea. She’d almost tried to turn mid-step and strangle “the usurper” when she did. So Taylor did her best to balance them.

Pull on the spark, carefully, every hour, to hopefully purge or at least counter the brainwashing. Because if she spent weeks getting used to obeying, normalizing it, she might not see anything wrong with continuing to follow and obey by the end of it. So as she ran she tried to keep her mind busy and ignore the other girl as much as she could. There was an instinct in her memories, a reflex she was keeping suppressed so as not to fall flat on her face. But the faint memories of clean halls and isolation rooms followed by whispers of “M/S Screening” felt like a way out.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Side note: Loading and unloading boats while running at 19.5 knots was a very different experience then doing so while stationary. As expected, she needed practical experience. Also, now that she’d tried it, her idea of carrying seaplanes became a bit less useful. The boats could take being deployed that way. She was pretty sure if she tried that with a seaplane it would shatter.

***

Of course, this wasn’t all that kept her occupied. Observing, recording and experimenting with her crew occupied the other half of her attention, as after more than a day, the running didn’t really take any. There she made progress and grew more certain of her theory. Taylor had heard a number of terms thrown about commonly: rookies, regulars, elites. There was a slight whisper to them, like ghostly fingers, an unheard echo. She suspected that it wasn’t just some measurement of inner skill, but that it had practical effects. And that it applied to crew.

Because her nightmares were different. Some of them had morphed, specialized. Taylor had gone through all of them at the docks, then stuck with those most competent. After the nightmare work week, she’d created additional work shifts. Because her nightmares, the demons that crawled, oozed and skittered all around her insides? They could change and she depended on them.

When they grew tired she lost something of herself. Made more mistakes, was slower, less able. Having them working in shifts let her keep going, but she was never as fully up, fully in the moment as she had been at Midway. It was an advantage on the long, dull cruise, but something to keep an eye on. When she roused everyone, readied for war, she felt alive and present like she had only when her life was on the line. Hyperaware. But staying in that state quickly tired her and she’d drop like a stone afterwards as the world turned fuzzy and dull.

So. Her crew. The gangs she’d been using for loading/unloading had mutated, getting more defined feet and arms or tentacles. More able to manipulate loads and support her crane. It was just one shift, but when they were on the difference was noticeable. If she had to describe it, it felt like the rest were enthusiastic amateurs, or just out of school kids, while these were the kind you saw in the small ads in a newspaper. Someone professional, handy men who could be trusted not to fuck it up.

She felt oddly protective of them as they reminded her of the dockworkers back home. They even walked and cursed like them. Well, the two-footed ones, anyway. They felt like Regulars.

The second odd gang was on her bridge. If her dockworkers were a bunch of burly kelp-men and oddly humanoid cephalopods, her sensor crew were uncanny. A swarm of aquatic giant insects filled her bridge with an endless buzz of chitterling and skittering noise and movement. Their compound eyes stared unblinkingly at the screens and they reacted with lightning speed to any changes. Looking at them she felt confident they would miss nothing and knew every trick to get that extra little edge out of their gear.

She had some idea what an Elite was. Thinking about them brought the kind of feeling you get when you see a high-powered lawyer or a well-established Villain at work. There’s just a hint of awe in it. Looking at her sensor watch? There was more than a hint of awe. She’d never chosen any of them, they’d found their own way there and refused to budge. She hadn’t noticed because they’d never given her any trouble. They felt like movie stars, like royalty. It was like staring at a Legend in the flesh. Her Legend.

{Far Sight}

As Taylor’s sonar pinged and radar pulsed her mind expanded in wonder. This is why she could keep track of so much stuff in the docks!

She played around with it every day during the trip. It distracted her for a while, but in the end she did remember to come back to the topic before being rudely interrupted.

Taylor concluded that she needed to keep track of all her nightmares, theories, research and plots and that it was far too much trouble to do it all by herself and just with her memory. So she designated a particularly scrawny and dorky octopus to deal with it. A day later he showed up with a jaunty white beret marking him as first mate and a ship’s log. She had no idea where he’d gotten any of that stuff. He used his own ink to write.

Taylor tried not to think about the details too hard. They gave her headaches.

His first entry was that her crew was unbalanced and to institute regular drills. Taylor had a feeling that drilling her nightmares was like exercise for her new body. Something she had to do regularly and well, if she wanted to be fit and keep herself sharp. If she left them all to their own devices, they wouldn’t neglect her to the point of hurting her, but much like someone lazing about, she’d be unfit. She’d lose her edge and tire quickly.

***

Six days into their nine day trip they had company. A plane on the horizon and not one of theirs. It was too far away to clearly make out. Taylor kept quiet about it. Her escorts never saw it. They didn’t miss the air wings that came back a few hours later. The over-watch their sole Wo-Class carrier had put up was the one to raise the alarm. It started launching fighters, stubby hornet-like things. They looked like someone had fused its wings together into a solid plate and replaced their pincers and stings with guns.

Sapphire hesitated a moment before Taylor felt the focus of her whole formation switch to one of the light cruisers. She kept sending out orders and correcting everyone’s headings as they slotted into a [Diamond Formation] around Taylor, with ships stacked in straight lines in front, behind, and to either side of her. Her only instruction was to keep a steady heading and speed, no matter what. She watched them come in. That was a lot of planes.

She felt it then, as they closed in. They were small, but many. An extension of a distant power, but one that was familiar. Glory hounds, PR slaves, false friends that smiled at you while only thinking of themselves. Selfish pricks hiding behind a veneer of respectability. Heroes bound by bureaucracy and mired in corruption, ineffectual, impotent. An authority that shielded the powerful while abusing those it was meant to protect.

Or zealots serving a higher cause that excuses any cruelty, all their manipulations and machinations to protect their twisted ideals. Efforts that will paint her as a villain and hound her to the ends of the Earth until she submits to their judgments, their values or is simply discarded. Or worse, put in a cage and placed on display, helpless to do anything but be gawked at. She hated it.

They didn’t even try to talk, to speak or negotiate. They just came to kill her. “Fuckers.”

***

Sapphire kept a sliver of her attention on maintaining her position in formation and dedicated every other fiber of her being to coordinating AA fire. The Enemy would not have a good day, not if there was anything she could do about it. In moments like this some small buried piece of her wished her talents laid in a more martial direction. But she was, at her heart, an organizer. So the use of Active Skills eluded her. They could have used one right about now. She really didn’t want to come back to Shinigami to tell her they’d lost the shipment and Big Bertha.

Abyss alone knew how much a ship that big would cost to re-summon. Assuming Midway hadn’t sold her signature and one of the others didn’t nab her first. Not to mention how pissed Shinigami would be that she’d pissed away her winnings. Not to mention the overhead. It would take her months to dig herself out of that much debt.

***

Taylor didn’t remember much of the fight. The entire thing was a blur of raining scrap. Her escorts had filled the sky with fire and the plane had dived right into it. She’d tried to do something and pulled a muscle in her brain, hurt herself. Her head was pounding and her nose was bleeding. She blinked away the tears and found herself in a storm. She recalled seeing storm clouds forming as the Abyss readied for war.

The waves didn’t bother her. A slow check showed she was fine. Well, still down an arm, but otherwise fine, once she wiped away the blood. She had no idea what had come over her or what she’d tried to do, only that her spirit hurt. She resolved not to experiment in the near future and tried to remember. And she could. Her sensor watch had dutifully recorded the whole experience. Nifty, but she had no desire to strain herself while her brain was taking a pickaxe to her skull.

A quick check of her escorts showed they were down two destroyers and one of the light cruisers was limping. She could still keep up. A few others showed signs of battle damage, but most was minor.

“What was that?” Taylor asked.

“That was Saratoga and Yorktown saying hello.” Sapphire answered.

The quiet lingered between them, as everyone reported in and Sapphire tallied the state of her fleet.

“That happen often?” Taylor wondered, eyeing the horizon.

“No. But it’s not rare either.” Sapphire said, her thought turning to plots. Because it was kind of convenient, for multiple factions, for many reasons. Hell, her own might have exposed them as a test and exercise. Or to prune the weak. The Battleship Princess was unfortunately fond of that last one. Surviving built character. At least she was decent about re-summoning her servants. The one’s that mattered, anyway.

Slowly the storm faded as they sailed on.

“Think they’ll be back?” her charge worried.

“Not today.” Sapphire finished.

And really, for a first timer she did alright. Going quiet and silently following orders was about as well as that could have gone. She should give her a treat when they docked. Encourage good behavior. That Bertha would know and Sapphire would know she knew and Bertha would be able to see that would only make it sweeter. Ah, the joy of competence and grinding your subordinates beneath your heels. There was nothing quite like it.