Chapter Text
“All engines, full speed ahead!”
“What is that…!?”
“We need to stop Human Instrumentality-!”
“Goodbye, Evangelion…”
-
“No no no no no-”
“I was supposed to die- I was supposed to DIE!”
“I can’t do this- you take it! I won’t do this anymore!”
“I suppose, in the end, all I can do is run away from my responsibilities…”
-
Pain.
The sensation of nerves scraped raw, freshly grown and screaming as wet placental liquid dripped across deathly frozen ground.
Pain.
The sensation of blood pumping through freshly knit veins, tight and unable to handle the pressure until they were forcibly dilated or burst open and regenerated anyway.
Pain.
The sensation of organs coming into being where there once were none, crimson crystalline red weaving itself into an approximation of flesh and metal that towered into the sky.
Pain.
The sensation of being trapped in a tiny little cage- an orb too small to contain even a fragment of herself, before bursting free in a wave of screaming, raw agony.
Pain.
Salt licking across tender, raw skin and open sores. Rocks pressing against unarmored flesh as metal plates crept into existence little by little. Light piercing into baby fresh eyes that swiveled around and around before vanishing behind what felt like acres of smooth white skin.
Pain.
Existence. A futile struggle against the force of entropy. An endless march to find meaning in a world where there was none, an infinite toil to find reason in a universe that ran on nothing more than the basal laws of physics.
Pain.
Breathing. Lungs filling with air for the first time ever, a gargantuan mouth ripping free of designed restraints and drooling saliva mixed with blood and ooze with oversized teeth to match.
Pain.
Moving. Muscles freshly grown filling with electrical impulse, machine moving beneath flesh moving beneath bone moving beneath skin moving beneath cable moving beneath armor. Not in that order. Twitching and raw with an inability to perceive in those daunting first moments.
Pain.
The sudden jolt of panic that came with realizing one was alive, sentient, capable of reasoning, capable of taking all of the pain of its existence and filtering it into a normal human condition.
Pain.
Hunger. A growling stomach, churning intestines, an empty pit of nothingness within an organ that wanted at all times to be full. A psychosomatic response generated by an artificial organ in an artificial body, ruled by an artificial mind that did not know what hunger was.
Pain.
The aches of bones that did not exist. The pangs of organs that did not exist. The screaming of nerves that did not exist. The palpitations of flesh that did not exist. The writhing of a mind that did not exist.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain.
Pain-
CLARITY.
“KWEH-!”
And like a cresting wave, a slim, pale hand broke the surface of the water and dragged itself to shore, hauling with it an ungodly amount of trembling steel and bone and assorted material in the form of an almost delicate looking maiden- flesh so pale it turned white with any lighting, eyes glowing crimson in the low light upon those ice-capped rocks, hair tangled around her shoulders in a web of light blue that touched upon silver gray.
It felt like hundreds of thousands of tons of material, but by the time she’d managed to haul herself- spluttering and coughing, unable to comprehend just where she was at all- out of the water, the only thing she knew was that she was alive, that she was so much more than her size implied…
And that her name absolutely, definitely, a thousand times over, was not Ayanami Rei.
She wasn’t the same person. She wasn’t the right person. She wasn’t, despite her physical similarity, any version of the Ayanami Rei that had learned to be a human person over time, touched as she was by Ikari Shinji’s kindness and words.
She was already a person.
A nameless person.
A nameless person that was, ultimately, not human.
A thing with scrambled memories, no real way of knowing what exactly she was, and a dead certain knowledge that, if she left this island…
Far, far too many people would want to hunt her down and kill her for reasons beyond her control.
She didn’t know exactly what those reasons would be… but she knew for sure that she wouldn’t particularly like them.
All the same…
She took stock of herself slowly, looking down upon her newly revealed body with… some amount of wonder and awe.
She was…
A woman, very obviously.
Shapely- a waist that dipped in quite far before flaring out into a set of fairly wide hips.
Pale- her skin was quite literally pale white, though there were a few spots that seemed to have just the shyest touch of life in them- a pale, quiet red that showed through beneath that chalky white.
Buxom- well, she was a little bit proud of her shape, come to think of it. She couldn’t tell quite how tall she was, but she knew she was fairly tall, leggy, shapely, and busty. Her breasts even made it… a bit hard to see parts of her body by themselves.
They were also soft, delightfully fun to squeeze, and surprisingly sensitive too.
…
It seemed a more prudent course of action to finish making sure she was whole and uninjured than it was to spend far too long playing with her own anatomy.
…
Put the boobs down.
…
Put. The boobs. Down.
…
Oh for the love of all that held a soul, focus already!
It seemed that, whatever was in her mind, it seemed rather besotted with human mammaries and the shape of the feminine body- both her own, and in others.
That would likely turn out to be a consistent inconvenience.
Ahem.
Aside from the obvious of her body being… her body…
She also seemed to have… a Plugsuit. Black and dark gray, with red accents. The attire of the Ayanami that learned to be a person just shortly before her far too early death.
Her soul ached a little, feeling flashes of that life as if she’d seen them with her own eyes. Planting rice, picking turnips, reading books, learning to live…
But it wasn’t her, not really.
Still, as she sat there on that desolate beach of frigid rocks with nothing but high, snow capped cliffs behind her and frozen waves ahead of her…
She couldn’t help but weep a few tears for lives lost- lives that she could feel, despite not having ever seen them. Lives that she had lived, despite never sharing those names. Lives that flickered in the back of her mind like movies on a reel, snippets of desolation and isolation, of cold and fragile purpose, of trying and failing to manage in a world that was hostile to their very existence.
Purpose built. Failure. Alone. Unworthy. Coward. Doll. Machine.
She shook her head, taking a deep, slow breath- she couldn’t get caught up in the lives of those that were not hers, not when she had to keep moving forward.
Wasn’t that what she had been told to do, at the end? Her mind felt so… fractured. Raw. Based on events that might never have happened in the first place. Had she dreamed that massive Evangelion staring at her when she died?
Had she ever truly been alive at all?
What was she?
Who was she?
Was she…
The woman, for she knew not what else what to call herself, stood slowly and took in her surroundings.
…
Snow and rock, as far as the eye could see. Also, seemingly impassible cliffs and a surprisingly bright, barely clouded sky above. The ocean nearby was covered in an ice sheet.
There was a terrible metaphor for the amount of blinding whiteness around her in the back of her mind related to the average American conservative voter, but she settled for just squinting her eyes and trudging towards the nearest cliff face.
Hm.
Was there anything… on top of the cliff? It didn’t seem likely, with all of the heavy snow everywhere.
That said, it was likely better to check than to just wander off in a random direction and hope she found civilization somewhere.
…
She really hoped that there was something on top of this cliff, otherwise she would have wasted her time and energy for nothing.
If nothing else, though… at least getting to higher ground would let her see the surrounding area better? Perhaps she was just on some forgotten spit of land at an extreme latitude and there was still mainland to be found?
Hopefully.
If so… well. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but she knew the feeling of her own S2 Organ running in her abdomen. As long as it wasn’t destroyed, she would be able to exist in perpetuity, needing neither food nor water nor any shelter beyond that of her AT Field, which she had already been employing to prevent herself from freezing.
Because she was wearing nothing but a plugsuit.
In arctic temperatures.
Ahem.
She bent her knees ever so slightly, the motion comforting for reasons that really didn’t matter- it helped as a somatic gesture, in this case, but did little else. Same with the first vocalization she made in her entire new existence- a simple little, “Hup-!” of effort, and with a flare of her AT Field she found herself atop the cliff with remarkably little effort.
She turned around, taking in the sights.
…
Ah.
Even worse than she thought.
Literally nothing but sea and ice for miles around.
She suspected that if she walked to the other end of what appeared to be an island, she’d only find more of the same.
Hm.
But…
There was a building not too far away, down a path that she hadn’t seen from her previous location.
A small one, seemingly built out of… shipping containers, maybe? It had the look of something weather resistant, though not particularly well kept.
It was… abandoned, on closer inspection.
The sign in front was in English, which she could thankfully read just fine.
Norvegia Station.
And, below that, Bouvetøya, with some coordinates listed in smaller text.
…
Well, that didn’t tell her much, though what little she knew intrinsically of latitude and longitude coordinates made her think she wasn’t so much in an arctic climate as she was in the near antarctic.
Which bode poorly for her attempts at escaping this frozen hellhole.
Ah.
A swear word.
It seemed that… whatever it was that traded places with her mind wasn’t quite as dead as it wanted to be.
A pity- something that suffered so much should have the rest it deserved, though… she supposed that she might as well try to remember that fragile soul with what she could.
The woman breathed slowly, taking gentle, padding steps up the somewhat rickety stairs of the Norvegia station, peeking through the windows and trying the door.
Locked, but easy enough to unlock. A simple twist of her AT Field slid the pins into place, and she stepped inside into… relative warmth. Warmer than the outside by some degrees, and with running electronics that, likely, were charged by the solar panels and turbines outside. Self sufficient, in order to send what looked like weather data.
Hm…
It looked like this place could hold… six people? Seven in a pinch. But there wasn’t really anything she particularly cared about at the moment. All of the documents were interesting in a general scientific sense, of course, but beyond that…
No maps of anything but the local area. No way off the island.
Just her, and the quiet hum of electronics as she sat there upon one of the bunks and contemplated her next move.
Obviously, she would need to get a handle on what she was, on who she was, on what she wanted to do, on her abilities, her memories, her personality…
There were so many things to be done, and she had no idea what her place would be in a world without Evangelions-
A world without Evangelions.
A world without Evangelions.
Yes- Ikari Shinji had created a world without Evangelions, hadn’t he?
So then…
How was she here?
Why was she here?
Who was she, really?
What was she?
And… most importantly, and perhaps least importantly at the same time…
“... What is my name…?”
Chapter Text
“Fuck. Shit. Damn. Piss. Ass. Cunt. Cock. Dick. Whore. Bastard.”
Ah, the joys of simple, direct, immediate communication via a variety of pejoratives aimed at literally anyone and everything around oneself.
None of the words were said with any inflection whatsoever, but rest assured that the nameless woman was feeling every single one as she trudged through the snowstorm that had suddenly blown through the island and reduced all visibility to just about zero in the span of about thirty seconds.
It wasn’t a particularly pressing matter, but it was an annoyance considering that she’d been attempting to find her way towards the nearest continent by… mostly, trying to remember where Bouvet Island was in relation to everything else, picking a direction, and praying she made landfall before she went insane from boredom, isolation, and lack of anything to do.
She still had no idea if she’d have to swim, or if she could just fly. Her memories indicated wings- shining white wings…
What was she?
Some kind of…
The words Mass Produced Evangelion somehow felt wrong, but the image they conjured in her mind almost felt right. White armored, standing tall and proud and violent with cruelty and lack of consciousness… Eyeless faces with jagged red smiles…
Yes, those images felt appropriate, but scattered.
Perhaps that was what she was.
Wings like a bird, stretching from her back and carrying her aloft- but then again, she didn’t need the wings, technically…
Where was she again?
Right.
Trudging alone through a snowstorm, completely blinded and unable to get any sort of bearings at the moment, using her AT Field to block out the weather and carve a path through the nearly meter tall snowdrifts…
There sure was a lot of snow around…
“... Hm. I do not know what I was expecting. Snow tastes exactly like cold water,” she remarked to herself, not even bothering to jot that down because it was quite possibly the most obvious conclusion in the world. Why had she licked the snow in the first place?
Some kind of human instinct, she supposed.
What was next, licking random items that she thought were halfway interest-
“... Rocks taste like rocks.”
Dammit.
“Lichen. Cold. Dry. No major nutritional value. Moss. Cold. Damp. No major nutritional value. Rock. Crunchy. Frigid. Metallic ores provide moderate energy boost. Interesting.”
…
…
Wait- what?
The as of yet still nameless woman looked down at the chunk of… some kind of rock she was holding. It had a bite mark taken out of it, and for some godforsaken reason, she could tell that it had enough iron content in it that it actually tasted almost good to her senses.
Which… should not have happened? Nothing in an Evangelion’s biomechanical makeup suggested a taste for eating rocks. Usually they survived off of whatever nutrient slurry was added into their LCL system and the mechanical repairs done by the assorted work crews tasked with keeping them functional.
And yet…
Interesting.
She still didn’t feel any particular sense of hunger, but… was this the feeling that humans described as… “I could eat”?
She could eat.
She wasn’t hungry, but she wasn’t feeling particularly bloated nor lacking in material capacity, so… therefore, she could eat.
Interesting.
What a surprising way to learn she still had some remnant of humanity in her inhuman makeup.
…
She still didn’t have a name, though.
What would she even call herself?
Ayanami wasn’t an option- despite appearing as an Ayanami, she wasn’t even remotely close to them. Her thought processes were currently similar, but tainted by an outside vector that she had no real knowledge of. A scattering of faint memories, a few inclinations in one direction or another. Some personality traits that she couldn’t imagine manifesting any time soon. Shikinami was an even worse option- she wasn’t anything like Shikinami Asuka Langley. Not in appearance or personality or lived experiences. Or… was she sure it was Shikinami and not Soryu?
… Her memories felt so unclear, even as she saw snippets of the woman’s life as if it had been through her own eyes.
No.
Shikinami was out.
Anything related to Asuka was out- hell, any name related to any former member of NERV or WILLE was out.
She wasn’t them. She didn’t have a connection to them. She might be carrying their memories as if she’d lived them herself, but that didn’t mean that it meant anything. Like a hard drive carrying on the last words of the deceased. Like a time capsule of all of the worst horrors in the world. Like a recording of the Apocalypse, meant to live on as a warning for those to come.
She wasn’t exactly a person so much as she was a loose collection of scattered pages, drifting around an empty husk of an Evangelion crammed into the shape of a girl who died as more of a human than she ever was.
So.
She should pick a new name.
A new name that didn’t belong to anyone.
A name that didn’t evoke the people and precious memories of a past that was not hers. She carried the memories of people she’d never met, but she couldn’t claim relation to anyone except by matching appearance.
Honestly, she was the one who deserved the name Miss Lookalike more than the Ayanami who’d grown into her own version of Rei over the course of a few short days.
What a wonderful experience, that seemed like…
She wondered how she knew it.
… Maybe…
She could… grow into a Rei too?
Stumbling, softly, into a life where she could be a person? A human? Perhaps she wasn’t a person now, even with the words and feelings she already knew, but…
…
She sighed quietly, tapping the collar of her suit and biting her lip as she came across the shore again- frozen and slippery to any without an AT Field allowing them to keep perfect balance, nearly unscalable to anyone without the ability to fly.
The sun was still hidden behind the storm above, and she…
She shook her head, staring blankly out on the frozen ocean ahead and letting her thoughts roil in her mind.
Well…
If she was going to learn to be a person, then she was starting from Zero. The sum total of her experience in this world, as her own being and not just some kind of amalgam based on some mashed together remnant of those who were lost… was Zero.
Zero Zero.
00.
The same as the original Ayanami Rei’s Evangelion unit.
Zero, meaning Rei. Rei, meaning Zero.
Rei was a pretty name. It made her feel ever so slightly more connected to the memories of her past, scattered and fragmentary as they were. It didn’t quite feel like the right name….
But it would do for now.
She’d come up with something better when she finally understood what she actually was.
If she ever found out… if she was more than that loose collection of pages.
If she ever found a place where she could settle and think about it- somewhere that wasn’t this…
Frigid hell hole.
It wasn’t particularly conducive to making grand revelations about oneself, after all- the last time any of her kind had spent too long in the ice, the Lilin had caused Second Impact!
… Or… was it her kind?
Rei shook her head, growling under her breath to keep her mind in the present instead of stuck in the past, in memories that tangled like cables beneath winding corridors and hidden racks. No sense in thinking about that right now. What was important was finding some kind of civilization, some kind of life. Somewhere she could figure out who she was and her place in the world the way that all children ought to- by experiencing the people who lived around her, and learning from them. All the good things, the bad things, the normal days, the happy days, the sad days…
She wanted to know what they were like firsthand, not just from some memories that she carried with her.
Idly, Rei wondered if humans would be scared of her. White hair and red eyes were hardly common, after all, and while albinism was definitely a trait that manifested in roughly one in every… five to twenty thousand people depending on where one was descended from… Rei didn’t exactly express the normal traits for that demographic either.
For one, it wasn't a lack of pigment in her body, but the fact that her skin was actually stark, pale white. For two, her eyes weren’t just red because of a lack of pigment, but they were actually red. Vibrant, vivid, not the dull color usually associated with albinism- almost glowing , really.
… They might have actually been glowing, actually.
Rei didn’t have a particularly scientific method of checking at the moment, but she’d seen flickers of red when the snow swept past her face and could only conclude it was reflecting light from her eyes.
Ahem.
Was this what it was like to be human? Her thoughts felt so… scattered. Raw. Unfocused. Constantly drifting from one topic to another faster than she could really process.
Some parts of her were keeping an eye on her surroundings (snowstorms, ice, cliffs, island, water), some parts of her were musing about her own existence (a treatise on what it meant to be a person when one sprung fully formed from the ocean with no progenitor), some parts of her were-
“... I need to stop fondling my own breasts whenever I am distracted,” Rei grumbled, slowly removing her hands from her own chest and pouting ever so slightly.
Ugh.
What a ridiculous new set of instincts she had to deal with.
Still.
She’d spent enough time on this island.
If she wanted to learn how to be a person properly, then…
She needed to find people.
Obviously.
If she wanted to be a person, then she needed to experience humanity. Had to experience… life. Working in the sun. Playing with the local cats. Eating good food. Making connections with the people around her. Learning new words and concepts. Understanding her own feelings. Putting words and thoughts to feelings for other people.
Her heart clenched a little, a half remembered sequence of events flickering into place in her mind-
A girl, lost in a world she didn’t understand, met by kindness and connection from everyone around. A girl, learning how to live and be a person, day by day by day. A girl, who found so much simple joy in working, playing, sitting in the bath with friends, eating, learning, walking, growing, reading.
A girl, whose life was cut short by an unavoidable flaw in her biology.
A girl, who deserved so much more.
A girl, who should have gotten to grow up, live among her friends and chosen family, find her own feelings and just…
Be.
But that girl didn’t exist anymore.
That girl died.
That girl willingly let herself dissolve into LCL because she enjoyed being alive too much to go back to Nerv and its cold, inhumane monotony.
Ayanami Rei just wanted to live.
Ayanami Rei just wanted to be a person.
Ayanami Rei just wanted to be herself.
And now here she was.
Fragmented.
Lost.
Alone.
Unknowing of the wider world.
A cold, almost dead woman in a sea of ice and snow.
Rei wiped a crimson tear from her eyes, taking a deep breath and focusing on the stretch of ocean ahead of her.
No better way to hold onto the memories of those lost than to live in a way that they should have been able to.
Hold those memories in her heart, knowing that they weren’t meant for her… and move on.
Move forward.
Take the first step.
Become something greater, something more.
Take to heart the lessons that she’d learned from the memories that she had… and become the person that they always deserved to have become.
Rei breathed deeply…
And took the first step.
Chapter Text
…
…
…
Rei took everything nice she ever said about snow and ice back. This was miserable.
At least being on the island provided some measure of entertainment by way of having landforms and features that weren’t just ice and snow and unbroken monotony.
Actually walking out onto the sea ice and making the first steps on her journey to… possibly South Africa, possibly some other continent… was an exercise in never ending… nothing, really.
The waves were calm.
The ice was flat.
Her feet left prints in the snow dusting the tops of the ice sheet, faint outlines that told anyone looking where she went- as long as the wind hadn’t blown them away.
Rei had no idea how long she had been walking, but… she had figured that making her journey by foot would be an appropriate homage to the ones left behind. The girl whose plugsuit she wore had made her own journey by foot, after all. She may not have an SDAT player… or any kind of music player… but… well.
It felt important that this first stretch of her journey was on foot. Something called to her that way, more than just making an homage to a dead woman.
…
It felt almost odd, seeing blue seas and proper ice fields instead of a never ending, dead waste of blood red waves. She thought she’d gotten used to it in the hours before, but…
No.
It still felt strange.
The ice crunched gently under foot. The sky remained unfortunately stormy, and yet somehow the waves were calm.
It seemed like the snow storm was focused around the island rather than her own path here. Good. She didn’t want to have to constantly use her AT Field to suppress the weather around her.
Monotony.
Ice.
Water.
Monotony.
Ice.
Water.
Monotony.
Ice.
Water.
Monotony.
Ah. She couldn’t even see the island anymore when she turned back. She must have gone quite far already… what was the distance for the horizon again? About five kilometers?
… Hm.
She couldn’t really tell what time of day it was through the clouds, but it almost felt like she’d walked long enough that she could have gone past the horizon line.
Rei pursed her lips silently, staring down at the lastest interruption in the sheet of ice in front of her.
Yet again, she needed to cross a stretch of water. A simple task, obviously- one’s AT Field made easy work of that, at least…
But it still felt almost like an annoyance every time she did it. She had to jump down to the surface of the water and then climb back out and it was just a whole thing…
Ugh.
When did she start having opinions?
How odd.
Perhaps the memories in the back of her head were affecting her more than she thought.
…
Rei still didn’t know what she was, come to think of it.
And there was only so much she could just… stare dead ahead at nothing, thoughts completely blank for all except the constant forward march.
Her AT Field rippled as she walked across the waves, knowing that at some point she’d reach the end of the ice sheets, no longer able to cross the distance as if on a false landmass, but forced to continue on solely upon the surface of the water.
What a time that would be.
She didn’t know how long she would need to walk for- her own calculations on where she were started and ended with guessing that north was the way to go, and that only worked inasmuch as it would allow her access to the equator if she didn’t hit a continent on the way.
…
If there were any gods listening… please let her run into something that could actually tell her where she was and which way to go.
A continent, a group of people, a ship, literally anything.
Rei really, really did not want to actually have to walk to the equator and then hit a perfect ninety degree turn just to keep walking some more.
…
Of course, clearly, she could fly, but right now her journey was in the walking stage, and flight didn’t feel like something she should try to do until she had met at least one person.
…
What a strange and arbitrary rule she’d imposed on herself.
Why?
How odd…
Well. It wouldn’t do to think about it too much. If she actually found walking to be tiresome enough that she could no longer stand the monotony, then she could unfurl her wings and fly away.
Because she had wings, right?
She… was pretty sure she had wings.
And if nothing else, flight solely powered by AT Field based levitation was simple enough as well- she’d seen more than enough examples of it in the scattering of memories in her mind that there was no doubt that she could replicate it.
Should she choose to.
But right now…
All she cared to do was to move across this stretch of water- this time on a whim just letting the AT Field carry her along like a moving walkway.
It was… actually rather pleasant like that.
There was a nice sea breeze that trickled through her hair and let her feel the coolness of the air- freezing for an ordinary human, but there was very little that was ordinary about her. For example, her ability to use her AT Field to modulate the temperature around her so that it was merely cool and refreshing rather than frigid and liable to cause hypothermia to unprotected skin. For example, her biological makeup that seemed…
Entirely nonhuman, for all that she was compressed into a human body right now.
What was she?
She thought, for a moment, that she might be entirely made of Core material, as if she was a Vessel for an Adam.
She had no idea for sure, though, and deliberately injuring herself at the moment to see what she was felt like a foolish thing to do.
Hm…
This was nice.
Moving along the surface of the water, drifting forward with nothing actually holding her back…
The sun off to the side, nothing but the endless stretch of open ocean before her…
And…
A girl?
All the way out here?
She was…
Stuck in the ice, it seemed, if the way that she was tugging one of her legs was any indication.
Ah- now she was waving.
She’d been noticed, and the strange girl looked as if she was motioning her over.
Well.
Alright then.
“Oiiii! Oiiiiiiii! Hey! You! Are you an icebreaker or something!? I need help! I’m stuck and I can’t get out!” the girl called out, continuing to tug at her leg to no avail.
Strangely enough, she seemed to be standing on the surface of the water without any sign of sinking, though her strange looking foot seemed to cause ripples around it just by touching the surface.
Something about her also twinged at the very edge of Rei’s senses, and she felt…
Felt like this girl was also far larger than she should have been. That she was… large. Powerful. Nowhere near as powerful in her AT Field as Rei was, but at the same time, far larger than an Evangelion would have been.
How odd.
What was this world then, if there were people like this? Not human, no, but…
Huh.
Rei got the sense of metal in there as well. How odd.
“Hello,” Rei stated in lieu of answering literally anything the other girl asked. She drifted a little closer, examining the ice that said girl had gotten stuck in. Ah. It seemed as though she’d been just slightly late and a path between ice sheets had closed before the girl could fully pass through. Though, strange that she was out here in the first place. “Who are you? And… what are you doing here?”
“Eh? Oh, you’re kinda tall…. What are you?” the pale, white haired and red eyed girl asked, blinking a few times. “You’re definitely not one of the mass produced types… Not a Ra, not the right color… Maybe an Elite Ne? Or… no, not a Tsu. You don’t have the hands for that… too tall for a Re, you kinda look like a Ta?”
“I do not know what any of those terms mean,” Rei answered flatly, without any sort of emotional inflection whatsoever beyond the quiet pitch of her voice. “I am me. That is all I know.”
“Ahhh, self summon. Gotcha. Well, I’m Northern Princess Fleet Elite Re-Class Aviation Battleship No. 0010! Or you can call me NPS Reiju for short.” the now named Reiju answered, speaking as though she was a large inanimate vessel instead of a rather average sized girl. “I’d show you my rigging but it’s uh…”
She paused, motioning behind her with a shuffle of her oversized coat, revealing what looked like… a tail?
A rather bloated, corpselike tail with metal parts and guns strapped to it, as if the tail itself was the head of a metallic shark. It was also… stuck. Somehow.
Rei blinked. Had that been there the whole time?
“Hey, speaking of… where’s your rigging?” Reiju asked, looking Rei up and down oddly. “Never seen a Ta without her rigging out… usually they’re kinda bitchy about it, even the self summons. Something about being built to be Flagships but… eh. Anyway! What’s your name?”
“... Rei.”
“Re? You’re definitely not a Re. I’m a Re. You’re like… a long haired Ta with huge boobs,” Reiju immediately denied, crossing her arms and stomping her free foot against the water, whereupon it splashed as if something far larger than her had displaced the wake.
“... Rei. Zero,” Rei repeated herself, with a slight bit more insistence this time. “Not Re.”
Reiju blinked. “Ohhhh… like the first half of my name! Oh, that makes us name sisters! Cool! Can ya help me out then? Also, I guess you’re not part of any fleet, huh? So far out from anything, sheesh… and a off-class self summon too? Poor girl, you really hit the short end of the stick… Seen a few girls like you before, most of ‘em end up doin’ something stupid and dyin’ though.”
“I see,” Rei blinked.
She did not, in fact, see.
“Yyyup. So… leg?” Reiju pointed again. “I’d do it myself but I don’t wanna screw up my propulsion by kicking it against the ice. And also it’s getting cold and I’m pretty sure either my Princess moved islands, or I’m on the wrong side of Russia.”
“Mm.” Rei nodded, then just… tapped the ice. It broke away easily, flexing under her AT Field, and Rei… had to wonder a little how the girl had gotten trapped in the first place if she could put out so much more force than she looked like she should be able to.
“AHHHH! AFTER TEN THOUSAND YEARS I’M FREEEEE! IT’S TIME TO CONQUER EARTH!” Reiju shouted the moment she was freed, taking on an odd sort of raspy cadence in her voice as she threw her hands up and grinned whilst shaking her palms dramatically.
Rei blinked.
She stared.
She tilted her head.
“I do not understand.”
Reiju deflated all at once, slumping down and staring at Rei like she was the crazy one. “Whaaaaa!? Really!? Aww… Aren’t you off-class self summons supposed to know everything about human media? C’mon! Gimme somethin’ to work with here, sis!”
“I am unaware of human media,” Rei answered blankly. She blinked again, then looked at Reiju oddly. “... If you are a ship of the Northern Princess fleet, then why are you so close to the south pole?”
Reiju blinked.
“Wait- this isn’t the arctic circle!?”
“According to the sign post on the island south of here, no.”
Reiju groaned. “Noooooo… I’m LOST! Again! Why does this keep happening to me!? I swear my compass works! I swear! It’s even pointing straight at… uh…”
She paused, pulling her tail forward and drawing out a tiny little version of herself no larger than a few centimeters tall. She squinted, listening to the small version of herself speak in what sounded like repetitions of the word Sink.
“... The- THE RED SIDE IS NORTH!? I THOUGHT THE WHITE SIDE WAS NORTH! WHY DID YOU TELL ME THE WHITE SIDE WAS NORTH!?”
Rei sighed imperceptibly.
Ah.
Perhaps her journey to learning personhood would take a bit of detour, then.
Tsk.
Oh well.
Chapter Text
Reiju, it turned out, was a profoundly chatty walking partner, and also seemed to have an exceptionally terrible sense of direction, for all that she seemed incredibly good at being exactly where she needed to be at exactly the right time…
Her current situation notwithstanding, of course.
Apparently her Princess- which, as Rei had learned, was the term used for the most powerful Abyssals- had made a push into more equatorial waters because, as Reiju quoted, “Hoppou-chan-hime wanted a vacation in the Caribbean so we tried to sneak through the Panama Canal”.
Apparently, it hadn’t gone particularly well.
As in, they made it into the Atlantic, but at that point they’d lost enough of the fleet that the Northern Princess, “Hoppou-chan-hime”, had called a retreat which took the entire fleet northwards.
And Reiju, poor Reiju, had gotten separated because they’d fled towards the Canary Islands where the European Princess and the Seaplane Tender Water Princess were currently anchored… only to get lost in a storm.
Because apparently it was fully possible for normal storms to sweep in and confuse Abyssals enough that one of them would get lost and start steaming full speed south instead of north.
… Wasn’t there an ice sheet up that way?
Apparently the princess in charge there, European Water Princess, was strong enough to have an entire winter path through the Arctic Circle all the way back to Unalaska where Hoppou-chan-hime usually resided.
How terrifying.
“So, off-classes, right?” Reiju spoke, as if she hadn’t been pretty much talking the entire time, filling Rei in on the last approximately six years of war that had been raging around mostly the South Pacific area and parts of the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. “Off-classes are kinda weird? Um, they’re like… how do I put it… they come out a lot like they’re older than they’re supposed to be? Like most of us, we’re six at most- I’m only… um…”
She paused, counting on her fingers. “Five years and eight months old! Tenth ship ever floated by Hoppou-chan-hime! That’s why I’m Reiju!”
Shaking her head, Reiju continued after a moment of getting her thoughts back on track. “Oh right. Off-classes. They’re… human? A lot of them die out pretty soon after they get pulled up, actually… I mean, it’s a harsh world out here and a lot of us normal Abyssals don’t really last that long… I saw one of my sister Re’s get blown up three months into her life. It was scary. And sad. I was teaching her how to read.”
“I am sorry for your loss,” Rei answered, not really sure what else to say.
“It’s okay! All of us except Princesses and Demons are pretty much expendable… and even Princesses can come crawling back out of the Abyss anyway, so…” Reiju shrugged a little, a slightly pained smile on her face. “It’s not like we ever stay dead forever! I mean, Hoppou-chan-hime’s had to pull me out of the Abyss twice! Sucks, but… well… y’live with it. A-anyway… um… Off-classes are weird and they’re weirdly human and a lot of them say a bunch of weird shit like they’re not used to their own rigging or anything, and some of them have really big boobs!”
Reiju blinked, then looked Rei up and down. “And you’re one of ‘em! Oh, and also they make a lot of references to human media that most others don’t get, buuuut… I got a lil somethin’ somethin’ that the humans totally don’t want us to have that means I get to watch stuff and understand those media references!”
“I see.”
Rei only sort of understood what Reiju meant with that.
“But yeah most of ‘em die cuz they’re really bad at killin’ and shootin’ most of the time. Or they just shut down entirely? Lights on, no one’s home, nothin’ to do but put ‘em back in the Abyss. A couple just keep their heads down and take it, some of ‘em run… Um… a few of them become Princesses? I know there was this one Hime who took over a chunk of territory and tried to start a mercenary company, but then she kinda… pissed off Central and uh…” Reiju winced. “Well, there’s a new Princess there now!”
“I see.”
Rei was, slowly, beginning to understand the structure of Abyssal politics. Namely: All of them were insane, most of the Princesses seemed to be the spiritual manifestations of veterans from a war well over seventy years prior, and there was a high chance that the vast majority of Abyssals were actually just children that had been forced to grow up too quickly, and had their aggression turned up to maximum by whatever created them in the first place.
How cruel.
Granted, she had no idea of knowing if her conclusions were correct, but so long as she remained unmolested and was not faced with hostility from any Abyssals, she would continue to treat them as though they were just as capable of logic and reasoning as any other sapient species on this planet.
…
Perhaps if the Angels had not all been violently incapable of communicating, perhaps they could have worked out something as well?
It did her no good to focus on what could have been, though. Right now, she was traveling with Reiju in… a direction that Rei wasn’t entirely sure of, but the girl had assured her that, now that she knew which direction was north, they’d get back to Unalaska in a jiffy.
Her words, not Rei’s.
Rei, for her part, was just content to let Reiju lead her along. It sort of felt… nice, wandering around with a companion. No pressing engagements, no pressing matters, nothing that really needed to be done except for just getting back to her Princess eventually.
“And like, a bunch of us ships self summon, right? It’s just that Princesses are usually the ones to do it… um, except for some of the ones that figured out mass production? Like, there’s a lot of New Aircraft Carrier Princesses running around with the same designation because they’re… I think they’re Aircraft Carrier Princess’ summons?” Reiju trailed off a little, tapping her chin and huffing a little. “I don’t remember, I haven’t seen one of them in a while. They might be dead? Oh, and there’s a lot of mass produced versions of the American Destroyer Princess… I think she’s building a harem on Okinawa?”
Rei blinked.
What?
“What?”
“I dunno, that’s just what some of the girls call it,” Reiju shrugged and looked as if she didn’t know or care what the implication of that was. Rei herself wasn’t even that sure. “Some big group of identical girls all doing grown up girl things on an island together. Which is weird that one of the submarines was the one telling me it was grown up stuff- I mean, that sub was like, half my age! Plus I know what sex is.”
Rei, silently, admitted to herself that she only had a basic biological working knowledge of what sex was. Tab A went into Slot B and a baby popped out after some time, depending on the species and specific breeding time.
Girls could do that with each other?
What an interesting prospect.
“But yeah, sometimes Princesses sink, sometimes they crawl back out of the water, sometimes they get turned into traitors,” Reiju spat out that last word with a growl, crossing her arms and glaring off at nothing.
Rei blinked.
“What is a traitor?”
“One of them,” Reiju snarled a little. “Those weird human looking girls that are like us, but they started killing us pretty much on sight from day one! I mean, okay, Central Princess was the one who started the war but even then! They’re jerks! And sometimes those stupid Shipgirls steal our Princesses for themselves, and then we have to re-sink them and bring them back out and even then, they don’t remember who they were after that! It’s like they’re a whole new version of the same Princess! I’m glad Hoppou-chan-hime hasn’t ever sunk, but I’ve seen it happen once… it was so scary… the way the storm just vanished, and it was like everyone just forgot how to live all at once…”
Reiju shook her head, shivering a little. “I don’t like it. It’s creepy and weird…”
“I see.”
Rei did not, in fact, see. She was learning that a lot of what Reiju said was going pretty much right over her head, but it was okay. She’d come to understand it in time, most likely.
She already had a workable knowledge of what each of the terms Reiju said entailed. Princesses and Demons made up the highest echelons of Abyssal fleets- with Demons being fully capable of being independent actors, albeit at a slightly weaker level than most Princesses. Then there were the “expendables” starting with the lowly I-class destroyers, which looked like some kind of strange shark boat, and going all the way up to Elite classes and flagships. The more human an Abyssal looked, the stronger they tended to be unless they were an off-class, in which case they usually looked very human, but had a completely unpredictable level of power.
To Abyssals, one’s fleet was basically one’s family and workplace rolled into one- everyone played their part and orbited around the Princess or Demon in charge, kept patrol areas secure, managed shipping and supplies, waited around for daily rations of things like oil and steel and bauxite plus some more exotic materials for ammunition, and generally just did as a fleet ought to do.
Just… with less naval discipline.
Princesses could only teach as much as they themselves knew, and while some Princesses were born with manuals aplenty on naval tactics and all the important parts of running a fleet, some fleets had to deal with learning all of those things from scratch- taking the instincts they had as warships and turning it into workable strategy, even when most of their fleetmates were either animalistic or simply just naive.
Abyssals were not always prone to listening to their masters, despite how much they revered their Princesses.
There was also something called Sailwitches that Reiju spoke of in equal parts awe and fear, said to be ships from even older times- wooden hulls and rope and cloth instead of steel and aluminum. Cast iron cannons firing stone or iron balls rather than the high velocity cannons of the modern day. Still, they gained their relevance in both Abyssal and traitorous fleets due to their increased ability to command the magics of the seas- sometimes even more than Princesses themselves… if only in skill instead of raw power.
Reiju had never met a Sailwitch before, but apparently there was at least one Sailwitch Princess out there and that no one liked thinking about them because they were just plain scary. And more than capable of making everyone that wasn’t a high level Princess regret coming near their island.
How terrifying.
The seas were definitely more alive than she ever remembered them being, and it was a brand new world with so much to learn that Rei didn’t even know where to start.
So…
For now, until she could make a decision on whether or not the differences between Abyssals and humans and Shipgirls were too much to reconcile… she would simply learn as much as she could, and see if life among the Abyssal fleets was worth living.
Perhaps she would become a person that way as well? Who was to say, really.
Well.
Regardless of that…
They had a long way to go either way.
“Oh! Sweet! Tuna! I love tuna!” Reiju called out, looking almost manic in her excitement as she reached into the water with her tail, bit down, and ripped a two meter long, struggling tuna out of the water with a shout of joy. “Woo! Fish! Aw man, the girls back home would love this! Too bad it won’t keep that long… Oh well!”
Crunch.
And without any preamble whatsoever, Reiju began biting into the squirming, slimy, saltwater covered fish as it tried desperately to get out of the jaws of a predator far stronger than it.
Crunch.
There was red everywhere.
Crunch.
“Oh! Rei! Y’want any of this? It’s soooooooo tasty!”
Crunch.
Rei blinked.
She stared.
She looked down at her own two hands, then at the no longer moving fish that had several bite marks taken out of it- each one far larger than what could have been made by a human mouth.
She pursed her lips.
…
Well.
She did say she wanted to learn new things, right?
She’d never had raw tuna before.
…
CRUNCH.
Chapter Text
Well.
They were definitely in warmer waters now.
Unfortunately, being in warmer waters meant that they were now off the coast of Africa, which had mostly gone unmolested by Abyssal forces due to a lack of strong grudges from most of the Princesses towards that area.
That didn’t mean that it was free of being attacked, though. It just meant that the entire continent save for the sections that touched the Mediterranean Sea were considered lower priority. The same as South America, according to Reiju.
The Abyssal didn’t seem to have any compunctions about saying that she wouldn’t mind doing a quick shore landing and blowing up a town or two just to show those little meatbags who the real queens of the seas were… but at the same time, she’d followed it up with how she’d rather not have to deal with a naval response when they were just two ships and the naval bases that had been set up all over the coastlines of every continent usually housed at least six Shipgirls each. She’d only get, what, a few hours of violent rampaging before she got murdered?
Pass.
She’d keep her violent urges to either actual engagements with her sisters or digital media.
Rei didn’t particularly understand the urge to go violently kill a bunch of people that weren’t bothering them, but she also didn’t think particularly much about it either way. Humans were much the same at times, were they not? Serial killers, terrorists, criminals of all stripes, politicians, warmongers, warlords… She knew, vaguely, that humans could be worse than any amount of Abyssal violence, for at least the Abyss was equal and simple in its cruelty, and did not indulge in the many, many horrors that mankind fostered upon its own kind.
They killed humans, clean and simple.
Rei respected that, in as much as she respected the concept of violently murdering something that could only barely fight back and was just as sapient as she and her companion were.
That said.
They were also in exactly the wrong part of Africa for actually managing to get to the European Water Princess, because after almost nine straight days of sailing they had just hit the northern part of the Strait of Mozambique (after a quick detour onto shore some while back to find a map that wasn’t several decades out of date and waterlogged into a crumbly mess), which was the body of water between Madagascar and Africa’s east coast.
Which meant that they were lost.
Again.
And also trying to read a map written in, surprisingly, Portuguese.
…
Which was a language that neither of them could read.
That situation had been infuriating enough that Rei had let out a single, solitary “fuck” to express her immediate and overwhelming annoyance.
Regardless, sailing the seas didn’t particularly need them to understand the languages of the locals- all they needed to do was understand the ones that they were going to see. For some reason, almost all Abyssals spoke either English or Japanese, with a smattering of other languages in between. Reiju spoke mostly English, occasionally Japanese with enough fluency that she could swap back and forth, and Rei…
Rei wasn’t entirely sure how she spoke both fluently, when her last memories said that ninety nine percent of the people whose memories she held safe spoke only Japanese and very little English. Perhaps it was a leftover from the vague presence in the back of her mind- a mind that decided to give up existence in exchange for someone else’s life.
She wasn’t really sure how to deal with that, honestly.
What was more important than leaving the Strait of Mozambique, though, was coming up on what the map seemed to say were the…
Um.
Comoro Islands?
That seemed about right, working off of what little she could assume about the Portuguese language.
…
The Comoro Islands which were currently under fire from what looked like an entire fleet of Shipgirls.
Because there was an entire Abyssal base there.
And there were what seemed to be nearly thirty Abyssal girls fighting back desperately as those Shipgirls did their best to annihilate their entire home.
It felt one-sided, Rei observed as she and Reiju skidded to a near halt barely more than two nautical miles away from the entire fray. Even with the Aircraft Carrier Demon who owned the area doing her best to rain hell upon her enemies, there was enough anti-air fire going on that it made the entire situation dicey for the Abyssal defenders.
“This is bad,” Reiju spoke up quietly, grimacing as she held a hand out in front of Rei. “There’s no way the Demon’s gonna live through this- look at how many of those Wo’s are already half dead! We got here at the worst possible time too- see those Wa’s? They were hit first, and now only a few of ‘em are left. The Nu’s can’t keep up, and all the I’s, Ro’s, Ha’s, and Ni’s are already dead in the water… I’d bet anything they’ve got subs there too… makes it worse- there’s no Ka’s or Yo’s or So’s anywhere near here!”
“Should we assist?” Rei asked curiously, watching the battle go on faintly in the distance. From here, it seemed like a far away cacophony, one that wouldn’t come closer or touch them, but Reiju had already explained that sometimes combat like this took place at close ranges for more girl combat, and at standard nautical ranges for ship combat. Meaning that they were absolutely in range of anything with a big enough cannon.
Probably.
The finer points of naval combat escaped Rei’s understanding, and so far her only real idea of what ship to ship combat looked like was just far enough that she couldn’t get a view of what the actual tactics were…
Well.
Beyond a bunch of girls charging at each other and unloading heavy ordnance right into each other’s faces.
“What do you mean we!?” Reiju asked incredulously, staring at Rei like she was the crazy one… and not the Abyssal who regularly helped a certain set of fishing trawlers in Alaska in exchange for them paying the bills for her satellite internet connection. “I’m only one battleship and I don’t have anywhere near enough planes to do anything in this fight! A-and you don’t even have rigging! I didn’t say anything about it before but what kind of Abyssal doesn’t have any rigging!? You’re a sitting duck! You might as well be a tender! O-or a cargo ship or something!”
“I… do not think I am any of those things,” Rei blinked slowly, reaching out and patting Reiju’s head. “Do not worry. I will intervene.”
“You’ll die!” Reiju protested, grabbing Rei’s wrist weakly in an attempt to stop her from pulling away. “I may have only known you for a little over a week now, but I’m not letting you throw your life away just because you think you can play nice with a bunch of creepy human loving weirdos who shoot first and hate us for existing!”
“I will not throw my life away,” Rei answered easily, pulling her arm back gently before giving Reiju the smallest of smiles as reassurance. “I am not an expendable tool. Not this time.”
Reiju blinked. “Wait- what does that mean- hey! Wait! Oi! Don’t you just walk away dramatically like you’re throwing yourself into battle! Hey- get back here dammit!”
And so it went- Rei quickly outpaced Reiju even at the Abyssal’s top speed, using her AT Field to glide forward into battle without a single care in the world. As she passed into the Demon’s storm- weaker, she’d heard, than a Princess’ would have been and far smaller as well- she felt a fizzle against her AT Field, as if the very air was trying to enforce its will upon her, rather than the opposite.
Interesting.
But, she was well aware of the principles of AT Field corrosion. Where two AT Fields met, the weaker would falter.
It wasn’t about strength. It wasn’t about the amount of energy poured in. It was about sense of self. Willpower. The intention to enforce one’s will upon the world instead of letting the world push her around.
Rei may not have been particularly aware of who she was or what she was at the moment, but she knew how to use an AT Field better than anyone else on the planet… maybe.
Therefore, she adjusted her approach, strengthening her AT Field and adjusting to the specific frequency of vibration that wore away at her field’s edges.
Into the fray she went, past the outskirts of battle where the dregs of the Aircraft Carrier Demon’s forces were holding fast to their posts, making sure that their vital supplies weren’t destroyed in the raging battle. The Demon herself, a tall, white haired woman much the same as any other Abyssal, growled from atop her sharklike rigging, guns blazing as she threw plane after oddly spherical plane at her enemies and tried to sink the incoming Shipgirls one by one.
Already, she could see some of them had been hit, and some of them were peeling off to get their wounded compatriots medical attention.
Interesting, but ultimately not her problem.
She skated past the lines of battle, a plan formulating in her mind- she would not take a life, not while she still had the choice to do so, and so instead…
Rei slid to a halt between the lines of battle, gunfire thundering in her ears at an almost deafening level and threatening to disorient her from the explosions thundering against hull and water alike.
She spoke neither to the Abyssals near her nor the Shipgirls she felt a strange sense of kinship with, and instead…
She simply raised her hand into the air and spoke her will into reality.
“AT Field. Full Power.”
God had descended to Earth. All was as it needed to be.
How did one describe an AT Field, when one had no ability to experience it before?
Rings of scintillating, iridescent octagons spreading from a point of contact.
The world itself becoming dyed with one’s colors.
To those opposing an AT Field, it was an unbreakable wall, an impenetrable shield.
To those who felt its crushing power, it was the fist of god, an infinite amount of weight, a barrier that could fling them across entire continents.
To the Abyssals behind Rei, it was a blanket of warmth, promising them that they would be delivered to safety as their half ruined hulls and shattered bodies were gently moved back to shore. They would not sink, not now, not under her watch.
To the Shipgirls attacking the installation, the AT Field was a wall, a force, a wind. It did not crush or kill or injure, but it was neither gentle with its ministrations nor was it as kind in its touch.
Most AT Fields had a maximum range limit of about a kilometer in radius, sometimes higher, if only just.
Rei’s AT Field was uncommonly powerful, far stronger than it possibly could have been in any real Evangelion save for ones that had ascended to godhood, and as a result…
She pushed. She gained awareness of that which fell into her AT Field’s boundaries.
She shaped the field just so-
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH-!”
And all twenty of the Shipgirls assaulting the Comoro Islands vanished over the horizon with a twinkle of light, landing with surprising softness in the next body of water over. Which was, likely, the Mediterranean Sea.
The Mediterranean Sea that was full of Abyssals.
The Mediterranean Sea that was only barely managing to break even with holding the Abyssals back from ravaging mainland Europe and North Africa.
…
…
…
Oops.
…
That would be a later problem for Rei to handle.
For now, instead, she allowed her AT Field to shrink back to its normal state of just keeping her afloat in the water, and turned to face the shocked Abyssals all staring at her from the beach.
She blinked, then turned to where Reiju was steaming at her at full speed, looking more panicked and confused than the Re-Class ever had before.
“Ah,” she mumbled, just loud enough for Reiju to hear from a distance. “I can explai-OOF!”
And then nearly forty thousand tons of teary eyed Abyssal Shipgirl slammed straight into Rei’s arms and sent them crashing into the water all at once.
Ah.
This was fine too.
Chapter Text
“What… are you?”
“... I am unsure myself. I do not have adequate answers to give.”
“Who are you, then?”
“I am Rei.”
“How did you accomplish such a feat?”
“I utilized my AT Field to push the invaders away.”
“What is an AT Field?”
“A physical projection of the soul, characterized as a boundary in which all laws of physics must conform to what the bearer allows.”
If not for the fact that Aircraft Carrier Demon (ACD for those casually referring to her, Demon-sama to those addressing her) looked nothing like Rei, Reiju would have thought that the two of them conversing was like some kind of strange mirror with how alike their intonations were.
Of course, the Demon in question had a far deeper, more full voice that echoed the same way as all Abyssals did, and Rei herself didn’t have much of an echo at all with her high pitched, gentle voice… but they both had a rather emotionless tone going on, and they both used formal, polite speech more than anything else.
It was also just that one voice carried an unending undercurrent of violent rage, and the other seemed unable to emote at all beyond saying singular swear words every now and then.
Reiju was still kinda hoping that one day she’d hear Rei say more than just one fuck at a time.
Regardless, she was getting a lot of insight into Rei’s… Rei-ness now that someone was there who was smart enough to actually ask what the fuck was up with Rei.
Reiju was not, perhaps, the smartest Abyssal around the block despite being one of the oldest. She also wasn’t the most powerful, the fastest, the biggest, the strongest, the wisest, or the most vicious. That one went to some bitch named Rain that did a lot of missions back and forth between Midway and some other places. What class was that bitch again? Ne?
Scary-ass bitch for a ship a third Reiju’s weight class. Last she’d heard of the spooky woman, she could do magic about as well as any Sailwitch on the seas.
Freaky.
Also, fuck Midway’s fleet.
Reiju never wanted to be near that insane madwoman ever again- both her and Central were vicious about how much they hated humans, almost as much as all of the Abyssals that crawled out of the Solomons.
Ironbottom Sound wasn’t just a hole that the humans left dead ships in, after all, it was the world’s single largest spawning point for pissed off warships wanting to rip someone to shreds for how they were treated the better part of a century ago.
What was she thinking about again?
No, not how much she wanted to go ram a Dodge Challenger into one of her sister Re’s faces, though that’d be hilarious once she actually got back…
Uh…
Oh, right! Rei!
And her… Rei-ness.
Turned out she had spooky powers not unlike that of a Sailwitch, but like… octagons.
Freakin’ octagons.
Something about pushing and pulling? Or breaking the laws of physics? Reiju didn’t exactly know what the laws of physics were but she assumed that it meant that Rei was doing some spooky shit that most Abyssals couldn’t do, and most Sailwitches barely touched on.
Oh, and also that Rei wasn’t an Abyssal.
… Or a ship?
But that one was pretty dubious because she sure felt like some kind of ship.
But apparently Rei had no idea what she was, and she was like ninety percent sure she was something that was definitely crewed but also had no business being in the water most of the time.
Which was weird.
Not that there weren’t Abyssals that formed out of land vehicles or aerial vehicles, but those usually just ended up being mobile guns like the artillery imps on installations, or like, lil imp tanks or warped planes.
Whatever Rei was, she had some serious displacement going on metaphorically.
It felt like it was… quiet, though? Whatever that meant. Like her ship-self was there, but also not in a way that made it hard to tell if she was a ship or not.
Rei also didn’t exactly have rigging she was aware of, but she still sailed just fine, so it wasn’t like Reiju could really say anything about that- hell, some ships didn’t have rigging at all!
Those were usually the really small off-classes, though?
Ones that couldn’t exactly fight or whatever, and had so little mass that they were basically glorified dinghies.
Reiju, idly, remembered a time when she’d been sent on a trip to Fiji to help the Southern War Princess (and her associated Demon subordinate) with preparations for a big attack, because Hoppou-chan-hime had been one of the princesses asked for help, and she had met, of all things, a speedboat off-class.
No rigging, just pure speed. A hundred and fifty some knots at full burn… she was basically the perfect courier for running messages in the South Pacific with all of the thousands of little islands down there.
Oh, and of all things, a jetski?
How a jetski had enough of a grudge to be raised as an Abyssal was entirely beyond Reiju’s comprehension, but that little feather of a girl had a violent thirst for blood and just enough rigging to pull out her propellers and… well.
Even Reiju was a little disturbed by how well she flayed those humans.
Where was she again?
Oh right.
Aircraft Carrier Demon was still interrogating Rei, and it was still basically just the two of them speaking in very short, very clipped sentences with very little expressed emotion whatsoever.
It was kinda funny, the way that they said exactly what they meant and no more, no less.
There wasn’t really much else to do at this point…
… well. She could go check on some of the survivors, see who was already out of the repair baths and if there were some supplies she could bum off of anyone- no one really disliked Hoppou-chan-hime, so it wasn’t like they’d be refused supplies on sheer principle, but at this point it was becoming pretty clear that the Comoro Islands probably weren’t the best stopover for them, and there was no way in hell they could approach Socotra Island at the moment- just to the north it might be, but it was also an area that got patrolled way too much for comfort during most of the year, and Supply Depot Princess only showed up there during the summer months.
So.
Not a lot of chance of stealing spare supplies from there- the girls stationed there took their jobs way too seriously and most of them decided that sinking anything that got too close was a valid option instead of letting one singular Re-class refuel on something that wasn’t just big ocean fish for once.
Ugh.
Her left turbine for some oil and steel cookies right now… the tenders back home made the best snacks, and somehow always managed to make sure there was enough bauxite to go around. Probably thanks to the Wo’s making sure their supply lines to the South Pacific remained relatively undisturbed for how long the journey was.
Fresh bauxite out of Indonesia was basically their only supply unless they wanted to make a run on south Australia or Brazil.
… Huh.
Reiju and Rei totally coulda hit up Brazil if they hadn’t taken that wrong turn at Cape Agulhas. Damn.
Reiju wanted to find out if there really were tanned beach babes with short shirts, bikini thongs, and even shorter shorts just wandering around out there.
Mostly in a scientific way, really. She’d seen enough stuff on the internet that she wanted a closer look… and/or maybe to blow it up if it ended up being not to her liking.
Eh.
Nah. She didn’t really hate humans that much, but she couldn’t deny it was kinda funny watching them go pop every now and then.
…
Note to self: Find out if Japanese McDonald’s is as good as all the anime she’s watched implying it is.
Note to self: Figure out how to get to a Japanese McDonald’s without getting a bunch of cannons shoved up her butt for daring to try.
Hadn’t that one now-gone princess near Australia tried to open a dialogue with the humans about McDonald’s?
Must have been good stuff (better than home, maybe?) if her girls were willing to go along with it. Did it match up to oil and steel cookies, though…
Probably not.
…
Note to self, spend more time actually looking up what certain stuff meant on the internet, because she was starting to wonder weird things like “do they really call it a Royale with Cheese in France” and “what does it mean when a commercial has a bunch of really fast words at the end” and “why the fuck is a Baconator called a Baconator”.
Bored bored bored bored bored…
Oh, Rei was done getting interrogated! Yaaaaay!
She looked a little sleepy now, though…
“Oh, you’re done! How was it?” Reiju asked, as if she hadn’t been more or less listening in just like every other ship on the beach with good enough listening devices. She tilted her head a little, looking her friend up and down a bit. “Also, how come ya feel like a ship but y’say you aren’t? What’s up with that?”
“I am unsure as to what precisely I am,” Rei answered right back, exactly as Reiju thought she would. “I cannot specify as to what I may truly be, but a ship is not one of the things I suspect to be my true self.”
“... What do you think is your real self, then?” Reiju mused idly, reaching over and more or less draping herself against Rei because for some reason Rei was really nice to hug- squishy and soft in aaaaaall the right places. Especially in the boobs. Really nice boobs, she had. Very soft and pillow-like. “Something about a… what was it again? Big ol’ land thing?”
“My immediate assumption as to the truth of my existence is either that of an Evangelion or an Angel,” Rei explained, like Reiju hadn’t heard her more or less say the same thing earlier. She might have, Reiju had kinda tuned out here and there. “An Evangelion is a large, humanoid weapon. An Angel is a large biological organism that functions akin to a machine. Both are capable of generating extremely powerful AT Fields. Both are more than capable of performing the feats I have displayed today. Both of them are capable of flight.”
…
Wait.
Hold on.
Back up there.
“I’m sorry did you just imply that you can fly?” Reiju asked, looking at Rei incredulously, like she was the insane one of the pair, instead of the Re-class battleship that deliberately cultivated an air of reckless chaos most of the time. “What!? When!? How!?”
“I do not know. I can only surmise that I am flight capable due to having a roughly five hundred meter vertical leaping capacity,” Rei continued to… be Rei. Which meant that even with Reiju draped all over her, she just kinda stood there like a statue and only made a cursory attempt at returning the affection with a single hand on Reiju’s waist. “I may be able to test that theory, though.”
Reiju blinked.
“And how exactly are you gonna test and see if you can fly- actually wait you can jump five hundred meters up!?”
Honestly, the jumping part was the most ridiculous thing that Reiju had ever heard. Sure, yeah, flight or whatever- plenty of things could fly, but having a five hundred meter vertical leap wasn’t exactly common, even for things that could fly. It wasn’t like ducks had super strong legs, or any other waterfowl, and if they went five hundred meters up it was because they flew and then came back down.
Rei, meanwhile, just shrugged. “My mobility is far enhanced by utilizing my AT Field to facilitate rapid movement. Theoretically, I could fly with my AT Field alone if focused properly. Would you like me to attempt to fly?”
Reiju pulled back, thinking about it for a moment.
…
“Eh, yeah. Sure! What’s the worst that could happen?” she grinned, spreading her arms wide. “Do your thing, sis!”
“Affirmative.”
And then Rei sprouted a giant pair of wings.
Chapter Text
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-!”
It turned out that Reiju was neither a fan of flying, nor a fan of being lifted off of what she felt was solid ground/water.
“PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN PUT ME DOWN!”
It turned out that Rei loved flying more than she’d loved anything else beforehand.
“SHIPS AREN’T SUPPOSED TO FLYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!”
… Which wasn’t saying much, considered she’d just spawned into existence fully realized not more than ten days ago.
“PRINCEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSS!”
Okay, at this point it was starting to get a little annoying.
“I am physically incapable of dropping you by accident,” Rei sighed, finally putting a single finger over Reiju’s lips to quiet her frantic pleas. “My AT Field will support you without fail.”
“YOUR AT FIELD IS THE ONLY THING SUPPORTING ME!” Reiju screamed back, with about as much emotion as one could possibly muster about the fact that she was basically being towed along below Rei, cradled by nothing but a faintly shimmering string of whatever magic nonsense Rei could do with her so-called AT Field. “I’M SCARED!”
“We will be landing soon,” Rei responded without a single fleck of emotion in her voice. “Please refrain from struggling. It makes supporting your weight evenly more difficult.”
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH!”
So it turned out that Rei being able to fly opened up a remarkable wealth of possibilities for the Aircraft Carrier Demon. Not more than an hour or so prior, the Demon herself had asked Rei to take some cargo to Sri Lanka, where the Harbour (sometimes known as Seaport) Princess’ installation was. What that cargo was, Rei had no idea, but it was important enough that the Demon had asked Rei to take five Wa-class transports while she and Reiju made their way towards the southern coast of India.
Fortunately for Rei’s sanity, the Wa’s were more concerned with clinging as close to each other as they physically could for a bunch of Abyssals whose arms were literally bolted to their own rigging. They didn’t make a lot of noise, as it were. If they had been screaming as loudly as Reiju had been, she might have just considered taking the cargo in loose crates and barrels instead of neatly packed into a set of five terrified… women who were strapped to large metal orbs… and also had mushroom shaped metal things instead of human heads.
…
…
Rei, silently, wondered how that worked. They seemed fully capable of reasoning and humanlike interaction, but they were…
Less… present, sometimes?
They tended to only interact when cargo was involved, and were otherwise rather silent, though they seemed to be able to communicate with each other just fine.
Rei also noted that, unlike the basic Wa’s that were left behind on the shore in the Comoro Islands, the Wa’s she’d been tasked with transporting all had red glows on their rigging, and seemed to carry a bit of a red tinged, dark haze around with them.
Almost like Reiju, actually, but Reiju’s haze was… less present? Perhaps she was concealing it.
Whatever the case was, these Elite Wa’s were actually armed- three turrets total, though they were nowhere to be seen at the moment. Two three inch guns, one five inch guns. Added to Reiju’s sixteen inch triple gun, twelve and a half inch gun, torpedoes, and a set of dive bombers…
Well. Rei was reasonably sure they were about as well armed as anything flying in the skies at the moment.
“$@#^$%#@$#%-!!!”
Rei blinked, tilting her head as… something brushed past her perception.
She blinked, seeing the Indian subcontinent coming up in the far distance- coming over the horizon and looking… remarkably like… any other landmass at night.
There weren’t a whole lot of lights there, but that was probably because a fair amount of the southern tip of India had been evacuated once the Harbour Princess’ installation on Sri Lanka became permanent. Which…
Begged the question of how the navies of the world hadn’t already bombarded that entire area to dust? Or… any group, really.
Perhaps there was something to be said of Sailwitches, or Princesses with sufficient strength? Reiju had mentioned something about Abyssals interfering with technology when in close proximity and when projecting their magic, so maybe with a big enough installation it just wasn’t worth it to even try- entering the storm with jets and other aircraft would likely lead to cascading system failures, and long range missiles would probably detonate before they got anywhere near their targets.
“$@%#@$%!!!!”
Huh?
“Do you… hear that?” Rei asked after the second time she felt that strange pulse of… sound, maybe… rippling past her ears. She looked down at Reiju to try and confirm, and the Abyssal just shrugged.
“Eh, just some human radios or whatever. I guess they spotted us from up here. What’re they gonna do, though? It’s just some dumb planes that we can shoot down easily,” Reiju snorted with a roll of her eyes, huffing and reaching up to poke Rei’s nose. Apparently, at some point, she’d gotten quite comfortable with being carried around now that she wasn’t screaming the entire time. “Look, if they try to shoot us down, we’ll shoot ‘em back. Easy, right?”
“Mm.” Rei nodded slowly, continuing on her flight path without deviating. If Reiju assured them that there was no human threat, then… well. She might as well continue. Even if it did feel somewhat conflicting that she was more or less abandoning humanity in favor of cavorting with a bunch of genocidal non-human beings that wanted to burn all of humanity to the ground for the sake of old grudges.
She cocked her head as she flew, listening to what had to be radio transmissions as they got louder and seemingly more insistent.
She… really couldn’t understand them, since they were all in Hindi, and garbled to the point that she could not even remotely make out a clear word, but she assumed that they were trying to hail her and see what she was doing.
Reiju seemed entirely unbothered, and in fact had turned off her radio receivers entirely.
Rei, meanwhile, kept on her straight line course towards Sri Lanka, visible now as well…
And then a burst of radio signal slammed into Rei’s ear like a particularly harsh fuzz of noise, carrying with it some kind of muffled English…
Followed shortly after by a rake of bullets splashing harmlessly against her AT Field.
“Oops, they’re pissed,” Reiju snickered, watching the shimmering octagons ripple into existence without doing a damn thing. “Eh, just keep flying. Your AT Field’s strong enough to take all of this, right?”
“Yes, but I do not wish to bring conflict to a Princess’ doorstep. She has ravaged enough of the southern Indian coast. Giving her justification to attack again will only lead to further genocide,” Rei answered flatly, furrowing her brow slightly as more bullets streaked through the night sky and continued lighting up her AT Field.
It wasn’t much of an annoyance and it wasn’t particularly irritating, nor was it an inconvenience… but she could feel the bullets against her AT Field. It was unpleasant the same way that wearing certain types of fabric were irritating. Annoying the same way that certain kinds of food could make one almost retch.
It was… bearable…
But she kept having this awful idea…
Brrrrt!
Tsk.
Rei frowned, tracking the jets with vision that… wasn’t quite vision as they approached from a somewhat safe distance. A missile bloomed against her AT Field a moment later, fired from one of the jets some moments prior.
It still did nothing, but it did make Rei pause for a moment just out of sheer annoyance.
…
Mm…
“Reiju?” Rei asked, looking down at her first and so far only real friend in this world
“Yeah?” Reiju asked, looking quite confused as to what Rei was calling her for.
“I’m going to throw you now.”
“Oh oka- WAIT WHAT!?”
“I do not have any onboard weapons, and your guns will be largely ineffective due to your unfamiliarity with aerial combat. Standby. I will not drop you,” Rei twisted her AT Field, wondering ever so slightly why moving ships around felt so… natural to her… and then reared back for effect before launching Reiju like a ballistic missile straight at the first jet to hit the two kilometer mark.
“NO NO NO NO NO NO NO N- NYAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!”
The sonic boom and ring of rippling orange hexagons in the wake of Reiju’s departure were quite cinematic in the darkened night sky.
The explosion as nearly forty thousand tons of Abyssal steel in the form of a flailing girl slammed into and through the entirety of the Indian Air Force’s first interceptor lengthwise was even more cinematic, as was the short-lived aerial chase where Rei guided Reiju’s trajectory to punch a nearly circular hole through the main fuselage of the second jet, causing a second explosion.
And then the third and final one found himself…
Thrown out of his plane, by a panicking, screaming, severely pissed off Reiju who had, if Rei’s view of the situation was right, caught the wing of the plane, arrested her momentum, ripped the cockpit windshield off, and then stole the plane.
…
And then Reiju realized she had no idea how to fly a jet, bailed out, and was swiftly returned to Rei’s solid embrace after another bout of screaming and flailing while she crossed the distance.
“AAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! I HATE YOU! WHY DID YOU DO THAT!? I NEARLY PEED! I THINK I DID PEE! I WANNA DO IT AGAIN!”
In the distance, there was a third explosion as the now pilot-less jet slammed nose first into the hard, unforgiving ground and summarily detonated.
…
Was Reiju chewing on something?
“Huh. Say what you will about humans,” the now extremely disheveled, windblown, and rather sticky and messy looking Abyssal chewed audibly and gulped down something that sounded like scrap steel. “Those jets are tasty. Also, way too hard to fly. Seriously, there were more buttons than I’ve ever seen ever! What do they even need ‘em all for!?”
“I apologize for throwing you. You were the most expedient projectile weapon,” Rei vaguely explained, patting Reiju’s head gently before shaking off the sticky mess of oil, fuel, various aviation fluids, and random… mess… splattered all over Reiju’s body.
Honestly, out of all the fluids Reiju had been doused with, why did most of it seem to be unidentifiable splatter of some kind? All the rest of the normal fluids seemed to just… slick off of her. Mostly.
She still likely needed a bath.
“Well… it wasn’t so bad…” Reiju mumbled, poking her fingers together. “But I’m only gonna let you do it if you promise to catch me! I don’t wanna know what hitting the ground from this high up will do to me, but I’m pretty sure I’ll die!”
“I will always catch you,” Rei smiled ever so softly, continuing on her previous path without much preamble, completely oblivious to the radio traffic she was leaving behind. “I cannot let my only friend fall.”
“Aww, you’re a sap!” Reiju snickered.
Slightly behind the two of them, the group of five Wa’s just watched somewhat awkwardly as the two girls hugged, having now gotten used to being floated around like puppets on strings.
One of them, Aircraft Carrier Demon Fleet Elite Wa-Class Armed Cargo Transport Ship No. 0196 (ACDS Nove-Seis for short) turned to her sisters, tilting the steel cap that served as her head silently. “Wa?”
“Wa.” “Wa.” “Wa.” “Wa.” came a chorus of nods and agreements. Those two were cute together. If they got together, their romance would be full of chaos and death to the humans. And/or crashed cars.
All of them were aware of the Re’s propensity for vehicular manslaughter.
The rest of the trip passed uneventfully, with the Indian Air Force somewhat scrambling to bring up an appropriate response to three of their jets getting downed by a flying Abyssal convoy, before having to kick it across command lines to the Indian Navy, which resulted in a series of very incredulous phone calls back and forth before anything was done.
It also resulted in some calls to a few of the European embassies, to be relayed back to their respective Navies.
None of that was of any concern to Rei, though, as a far larger, far more present, far more obvious problem asserted itself the moment she met the Princess in charge of the Sri Lanka Harbour installation.
Specifically, her immediate and disastrous fascination with the female form (which, thankfully, didn’t come out much while speaking to the Aircraft Carrier Demon) meeting the nearly eight foot tall giant of a woman that was the Harbour Princess.
“May I please touch your breasts? I wish to shove my head between them and shake it back and forth vigorously for sexual gratification.”
“Excuse me!?”
…
Well.
There were worse ways to meet a Princess. Rei just didn’t know how at this moment.
Whoops.
Chapter Text
“Mdfofsdfsdfsgsdfsdgsdfsdvsdfsdcsdrfsefsddscsdcdcsdfsdcsdfsdfsdfdsfsd-!”
“Ara ara… so spirited…”
“She’s… really going for it…” Reiju mumbled, watching Rei put on the single most dignity destroying show of emotion she’d ever seen her fellow weirdo do. In this case… motorboating a Princess’ boobs. Vigorously.
Without stopping.
Because, aside from the disastrous events of their first meeting, Harbour Princess had allowed Rei to do as she wished after learning that not only was she the reason why the installation was getting a resupply run completely intact with no emergency repairs needed nor any major refueling to be done, but getting said resupply fleet on the same day it was scheduled to leave.
Rei had brought five Elite Wa-class transport ships packed full of vital supplies for Harbour Princess’ continued harassment of the Indian coastline across nearly twenty five hundred nautical miles of hotly contested, extremely economically important for both sides, waters with nary a scratch. In three hours. And the only problems along the way were three quickly downed fighter jets.
So.
Letting the strange probably-not-a-normal-ship girl motorboat her breasts for a bit was by far not the biggest thing Harbour Princess would have granted the woman.
It was, at the very least, worth a trip to the repair baths for Reiju to clean up some of her dings and scrapes and lasting battle damage from the fight she’d been in before she got lost and met Rei. Plus a restocking of ammunition, replacements for weapons damaged beyond repair, a few replacement planes, a full refueling- not that she needed the last one after having refueled back at the Comoro Islands installation- and full access to the galley.
Reiju had done all of that save for her galley trip, and even after several hours, Rei was still motorboating the Harbour Princess like her life depended on it.
What a woman Reiju had found, truly.
What a woman.
“Oi! Rei! C’mon, let’s go get something to eat!” Reiju called out, finally deciding that enough was enough and she should probably pull Rei out of the giant Princess’ tits before the rather motherly Abyssal got tired of dealing with Rei’s antics. “You’ve been in there for three hours! I had time to go buy a new raincoat off another Re, even! At least take a bath or something!”
“Msdgsdfsgsmdfsdsdfsdgsdfsmdgsdmfsdgsf-”
“Oh for-” Reiju sighed, palming her face before reaching up, grabbing the back of Rei’s weird rubbery outfit, and pulling.
“Ueh!” Rei made some kind of weird squeaky yelp as she got pulled out, thumping to the ground and huffing like she’d just sprinted around the entirety of Sri Lanka. A faint trickle of bright red blood leaked from her nose, and she stared up at the open sky like she’d just had a religious experience. After a moment, though, she turned her attention to Reiju and blinked. “Ah. I take it that I lost myself for a moment. Apologies. I do not know what came over me.”
“Rampant lesbianism,” Reiju deadpanned, leaning down to help Rei up with a soft grunt. Whoof, she was heavier than she looked, and her presence already said she should be about as weighty as, what, a Princess maybe? “Are you done? I don’t think the Princess will let you do that again…”
“I would prefer not to be so waylaid next time,” the Harbour Princess stated dryly, looking down at them with some kind of imperious huff. “Northern Princess Fleet Elite Re-Class Aviation Battleship No. 0010. It’s been some time, hasn’t it?”
She smiled ever so softly, then traced the edge of a massive claw against Reiju’s cheek. “How have you been? And what brings you to my part of the seas these days without a fleet at your side- from the West no less?”
Reiju winced. “... I got a little lost. Um. And it turns out I didn’t know north from south for a really long time? It just… wasn’t a problem before now since I was always sailing with my sisters…”
“Oh you poor thing! You’re so lost!” Harbour Princess gasped… and then proceeded to lean over and engulf Reiju in a hug that felt more like being crushed against a wall of marshmallows than anything else.
Note to self: ask that fishing trawler back home to bring over another bag of marshmallows. That first bag didn’t last nearly long enough, even at her strictest rationing.
Second note to self: get more chocolate for her sisters back home, and for Hoppou-chan-hime. She deserved it, and she really needed to bring home something good after being gone for so long. How long had it been now? A month?
Tsk.
They probably thought she was dead- well, all but her Princess. Her Princess knew exactly where all of her fleet was at all times, no matter what. So as long as she didn’t make Hoppou-chan-hime cry, everything was fine.
Hence… chocolate. Or some kind of snack food. Anything, really.
“How is Northern Princess doing, by the way?” Harbour Princess asked after a moment, letting Reiju go finally and allowing her to breathe again. “It’s been so long since I’ve received a convoy from her… is everything alright? Is she okay? Has she been eating enough steel? Bauxite? Drinking her oil? Have you heard anything from Northern Little Sister? Are they getting along? Do they miss me? Are they alright?”
“Um- yes!” Reiju sort of spluttered in the face of all that motherly affection, not entirely sure how to answer so many questions flung at her at once. “The last I checked on Northern Princess-sama, she was fine and healthy, and Northern Little Sister-sama has been over to play many times! Our supply lines through the Pacific are still robust, even with the interference of the traitors, and we’ve made some headway into increasing the total land area of the installation as well!”
“Oh, good! That’s good,” Harbour Princess smiled softly, patting Reiju on the head in a way that kinda made Reiju feel like a doll. “Very good, Reiju-chan. Very very good. I’m so glad to know that my little Hoppou is doing so well- please, stay and rest as long as you like. I have some imported goodies raided off the mainland~!”
“Ooh, chocolate!?” Reiju gasped, perking up a little.
“Of course! All kinds of sweets and treats, just like the care packages I send,” Harbour Princess’ smile continued to shine like fog lamps as she all but picked up Reiju and… awkwardly guided Rei along. “Come, I’ll show you where I keep it stored! This quarter-year’s package was going to be larger, but I ran into some issues finding the right sweets… tsk. Land incursions are always no fun, and Ourang Medan spends too much time keeping the island safe from retaliation to make sure that our land efforts remain safe…”
She sighed, as if she wasn’t talking around the wholesale slaughter and raiding of human settlements with Abyssal marines and land-capable ships.
Reiju, personally, didn’t care- she’d heard the same words and intent out of just about everyone she’d ever sailed with, and was also of the mind that most humans didn’t matter anyway. Well. She didn’t mind keeping them alive either, but hey, as long as the snacks kept flowing and the funny internet videos kept coming, right?
Rei, meanwhile, just stared dead ahead as they walked past more Abyssals than she’d ever seen in her life, all of whom seemed to be…
Doing… ship things mostly.
Sailing around chasing each other as some kind of game, flinging large hunks of rusted metal to some of the Destroyers like a game of fetch, playing some kind of incomprehensible ball game with what seemed to be a shrunken naval mine of some kind, surfing on large hunks of metal, playing with random clothes that they happened to have lying around, snacking on assorted items… there was at least one Abyssal submarine of a class she could not immediately identify pretending to sun herself on the beach.
Despite Harbour Princess’ everpresent storm swirling above and blocking out all the sunlight for miles around.
Rei wasn’t even going to pretend she comprehended that, and instead simply noted that down for later reference.
Abyssals seemed to be just like humans in their need for casual recreation, and also seemed to have very little discipline while not in combat.
It was like a military compound made entirely of bored children.
…
…
Were the vast majority of Abyssals mentally akin to children who didn’t know why they were fighting?
That had unsettling implications.
The even more unsettling implications were the packs of literal children running amok alongside the nonhumanoid ships, treating them like favored dogs or other pets, swimming and splashing around and laughing as they skirted out in the water.
Well. Some of them did.
The ones that looked like guns with toddler legs just toddled around and giggled with echoing voices as they occasionally fired said guns, fell on their rears from the recoil, and laughed in that shrieking way that small children did when something in the distance exploded.
Like a ruined house.
Or the wreckage of what looked like several civilian sailing vessels.
…
“Why do the small ones appear like human children?” Rei finally asked, tearing her eyes back forward and looking to the Harbour Princess with some amount of confusion. “What are they? And why do some of them not appear capable of entering the water?”
“Mm… the little ones are imps,” the Harbour Princess answered with an unreadable tone- nothing negative or positive, just stating things as if they just were. “They start out as land installations, mostly. Pillboxes, artillery, anti-air turrets. Sometimes they fuse with the installation itself, sometimes they gain enough power from the Abyss to become torpedo patrol boats, and even into Schnellboots if they eat enough resources and grow up big and strong… by the time they’re fully grown, they could develop into anything. Submarines, Destroyers, Battleships, Carriers, Transports…”
Harbour Princess shrugged. “It’s always fun seeing what they grow up to be. I wish it was easier to give them names, though… but you never know what they’ll end up being so it’s easier to just give them a number designation and watch them run around- they are very effective at clearing out enemy bases and installations. Why, I was only able to make this installation my home because so many of my fellow Princesses and Demons donated all of their imps for the war effort! So much land to cover… the regular ships couldn’t handle it, but the PTs and Schnellboots are remarkably quick on land thanks to their small size, and are much more capable of handling tight spaces compared to a Re-class.”
“Hey, just because I can’t move well with my rigging out on land-” Reiju huffed, grumbling as she cut herself off and looked away haughtily. “I can still clear out stupid human settlements easy!”
“But why fight in the first place? It is clear that Abyssals enjoy manmade products as much as any, and need manmade resources to proliferate,” Rei tilted her head slowly, not really comprehending the logic behind the extermination of the human race that it seemed the Abyssals were fighting for. “Would it not be more logical to approach them with diplomacy than it would be to kill them all?”
“They would kill us first, just for existing,” Harbour Princess answered, frowning slightly. “They use beings like us- weapons of war made by their hands, used to kill innumerable amounts of their own kind- and then throw us away. Scrap us. Kill us. Let us rust and die in the darkest depths just because they think we have served our purpose.”
She hissed, the storm above worsening to the point that it started to drizzle as she glared off at the horizon, as if she could see the mainland from there.
“We are no more than trash to humans, and targets to the traitors that still serve them,” Harbour Princess bit out, a crash of thunder illuminating the entire area in an unearthly blue light for a moment before she took a deep breath and calmed herself. “Or so my sister Princesses say, of course! I haven’t actually… I was a later arrival, unlike my sister Princesses who actually knew war under the weight of humanity…”
She trailed off, clearing her throat. “Perhaps things are different now, but… I would rather not surrender my holdings just to try.”
“I see,” Rei pretended like she understood, and at that point felt like she knew exactly why this entire war was ongoing in the first place.
“Anyway, here we are- oh!” Harbour Princess paused before what looked like an entire warehouse full of… items, likely, that Rei could not see due to the fact that the building had no windows nor an open door. In front of said warehouse stood… an Abyssal, obviously, but one whose presence seemed… strange, even to Rei.
Her dress was more humanlike, her rigging more defined and less organic, her appearance more human. The resonance of the area around her suggested a far more oblique and exotic usage of her own energies than Rei was accustomed to- Princesses and Demons favored projecting their energy in the form of a storm, from her two data points and Reiju’s anecdotes, and threw their souls around like battering rams to destroy all opposition. This woman seemed to have far less strength for that manner of attack, and instead… her soul flowed in ways that Rei could only imagine to be the sheer essence of fear.
It washed over her AT Field but did not settle, as Rei was the sole arbiter of what was allowed to affect her within the boundaries of her AT Field, and she did not need to be reduced into a shuddering mess.
Reiju, meanwhile, squeaked like a small child and buried her face against Harbour Princess’ side.
“Princess,” the woman who could only be what Reiju called a Sailwitch spoke, bowing lowly towards the tallest of their group. “I sensed an interesting arrival on the island and thought it best to come see for myself.”
“Ah, just in time then! Ourang, you’ve met little Reiju, yes?” Harbour Princess smiled, presenting Reiju’s reluctant form as if showing off a child to their slightly weird aunt.
“Once or twice, yes,” Ourang Medan spoke, nodding. “And the other? Curious. She does not cower before me… the only ones with enough power to do so are usually Princesses and Demons…”
“This is Rei,” Harbour Princess answered, patting Rei’s shoulders gently. About as gently as a giant metal clawed hand could, at least. “An off-class self-summon that Reiju found near Bouvet Island, I think she said?”
“Y-yeah,” Reiju nodded. “She’s kinda weird, really strong, and she can fly…”
“Flight? Truly?” Ourang Medan raised an eyebrow. “She must not have much displacement if she’s flight capable…”
The strange looking Abyssal turned, crimson eyes boring into Rei’s own. “Let me get a look at you, girl…”
Rei stood there, watching impassively as the Sailwitch reached out with one hand, met her AT Field…
And slipped through the boundary line just enough to touch Rei’s cheek with a metal clawed hand.
Flash!
“W-what are you!?”
Memories.
Images.
An unstoppable tide of sights and sounds, battles from the perspective of someone outside- no, someone that was the ship. Explosions, damage, unimaginable dizzying sights, violent maneuvers, screeching and wailing from both her own AT Field and her superstructure groaning.
Rei reeled back as Ourang Medan flinched and fell to the ground, both of them stumbling and panting from that brief moment of contact.
Ah…
So that’s how it was…
Rei trembled softly, gasping for air as she held onto herself and tried not to let that new wave of memories overwhelm her.
All of a sudden, she became aware of a humming in her body, the steady thrum of her core. The sound of footsteps in her halls, the feeling of resources moving through her bays.
Her wings, shining white and feathered, erupted into metallic blues and grays- becoming machinelike and artificial, and yet with clear biological inspiration.
Her rigging exploded into view, projecting the shapes of her old hull, her guns, her cages, her satellite dishes, her gyros, her tail.
Ah…
She understood now.
Rei- no, the AAA Wunder- understood now.
So this is what I am…
It felt…
Freeing.
It felt…
Good.
It felt…
Like she’d finally made a step in the right direction.
It felt…
Like she really, really, really wanted a beer right now.
…
Dammit Commander Katsuragi!
Chapter Text
Kschk!
Glug!
Glug!
Glug!
Glug!
Glug!
“Ga-HAAAAAAAAAAA~! KHAAAAAAAAAA~! This is what makes life worth living!”
Reiju blinked, staring at Rei, who, after manifesting her truly ridiculously massive rigging for the first time ever, had proceeded to crack open a beer can, chug it down in about two and a half seconds, and then did… whatever that was. “I-is it really that good…? Isn’t it… just beer…?”
“It is disgusting,” Rei immediately responded, crushing the now empty can into a marble in one hand as she returned to being her normal emotionless self. “However, the intent is not to drink for enjoyment. It is to remember the woman who was once the captain of the vessel that I currently am.”
Reiju tilted her head slowly to the side, uncomprehending. “... Was she really that impressive? Humans aren’t exactly… y’know… all that great.”
“Commander Katsuragi Misato would rather sacrifice herself for the good of everyone than allow even a single member of her crew to go down with her,” Rei answered stoically, crimson eyes boring holes into nothingness as she stared into the far distance. “She was… a woman of principles. Intellect. A strong moral code. A burning sentimentality when it came to the lives of her subordinates. She was also…”
Rei paused, grimacing. “A horrific slob who lived in piles of garbage, a disaster of a woman who smelled mostly of old beer and cheap perfume, and an incredibly strange person who thought drinking beer in lieu of regular meals and living with a genetically modified penguin was normal.”
“Sounds like some of my sister ships,” Reiju remarked, thinking back to how at least three of the Re’s back home hoarded alcohol like their lives depended on it. And that the survivors of that one Solomon Mercenary Princess’ fleet all chugged booze like it was water in remembrance for their dead commander.
“Mm.” Rei answered, and that was… just about that.
“... Your rigging…” Harbour Princess spoke up for the first time in five minutes, staring at Rei awkwardly. “... The colors are wrong… There’s no organics to it… are you even an Abyssal?”
“I do not know what I am,” Rei shook her head idly, looking down at herself and noting that, of all things, she’d somehow acquired Commander Katsuragi’s Wille coat- draped over her shoulders like it was a cape for some reason. Odd. “If I am not an Abyssal then so be it. I do not have a stake in this conflict, and Reiju is my friend. I will not turn on her if we are of different kinds.”
Harbour Princess stared, looking Rei up and down for a moment. “... I suppose that’s as good an answer as any. Ourang, are you alright?”
“I…” the Abyssal shook herself and stood, grimacing whilst brushing herself off. “Yes. I- I was not expecting her to be so… large… her presence and weight is… more… more than any ship I have ever seen in my life. Even entire installations pale in comparison…”
“How big could she be?” Reiju asked somewhat blandly, looking at Rei oddly. “She’s not that tall. Like, a little taller than me, right?”
“The AAA Wunder has an empty displacement weight of approximately one point four million long tons and a fully loaded displacement weight of approximately three million long tons,” Rei answered immediately, counting on her fingers for effect despite not needing to now that she had access to all of the AAA Wunder’s systems. Navigation data, weapon controls, reactor controls, path plotting, combat maneuvering, life support, heavy computing, internet access, air conditioning, food storage… and also the ability to eject her entire spine as a new Spear of Gaius, if she ever needed to start another Impact event.
Why she would ever need to do that was entirely beyond her, but she had the option, if she needed it.
Reiju just stared, jaw dropped. Harbour Princess, to the side, wasn’t much better.
“And… you can fly like that!?” Reiju somehow managed to ask through her incredulous disbelief. “How!?”
“AT Field projection allows a creative interpretation of the laws of physics,” Rei shrugged, then idly swiveled the guns on her rigging around as if testing out a new limb. “Ah… it is like Evangelion synchronization. I am the weapons, and the weapons are me. Interesting…”
“... I think I need one of those beers, Rei,” Reiju groused a little, slumping and huffing as she trudged over to her friend and grabbed the beer can that Rei had held out without question. “Thanks.”
“You are welcome.”
“... I see,” Harbour Princess finally spoke up again, then pursed her lips. “You two are free to stay as long as you like. I thank you again for escorting the resupply fleet so quickly- and, when you do leave, please give Hoppou my regards? She and Georgie haven’t visited in some time, and I’d like to see my girls again…”
“Will do, Harbour Princess-sama!” Reiju snapped out a salute, grinning the entire time.
“Thank you. Now, please, do enjoy the rest of your day.”
“Yes ma’am!”
And like that, Reiju did her best to drag Rei off to explore the rest of the island- which went a lot better than expected seeing as Rei was pretty much allowing Reiju to do as she pleased.
As they ran down the roads, Rei took in the sights once again. The Abyssal girls were the same as before, still doing whatever they seemed to care for when they weren’t on duty, but as they passed more buildings, it became clear that this was, likely, one of the single biggest Abyssal installations on the planet.
There seemed to be hundreds of girls here, all working and playing along the massive buildings and warehouses and Abyssal constructions going up and down the coast, even infiltrating into what used to be the cities and fields further inland.
There were dozens of Wa’s sitting in loading bays, either having cargo removed from their holds or added in. There were ships being escorted back and forth, with Destroyers skating around and barking while making sure no attack was forthcoming. Submarines crawled in and out of the water, battleships kept a heavy perimeter around the island where it was closest to the mainland, carriers kept a constant aerial cover around the most vulnerable parts of the installation…
It was like watching the workings of a proper naval base mixed with a city, like seeing the start of a society form in a group that already had access to heavy machinery and modern weaponry.
There were girls carrying imps around like they were babies, feeding them scraps of steel and bauxite and oil in the form of cookies and thick, viscous soups. There were submarines hauling in nets full of fish for cooking on what looked like large communal spits and in hastily welded cauldrons.
It was… surreal, just a little bit. Rei was aware that Abyssals were nowhere near the mindless monsters that Reiju had claimed all the propaganda called them, but to see them actually just… settling down and making a settlement- an actual settlement, with houses and commerce and games and specialized duties- seemed… far unlike what she’d seen on the Comoro Islands.
That had been a minor, easy stopover, but it was clear there that the Aircraft Carrier Demon had only recently taken the area, and her base was both new, weak, and lacking in the resources necessary to expand into a full, proper settlement. Not enough steel, not enough bauxite, not enough material to construct anything but wooden huts that could just barely function as barracks for the small fleet.
Rei honestly didn’t know whether to be impressed that Harbour Princess seemed to be building an Abyssal society, or mildly worried for the fate of humanity with how many Abyssals were stationed here.
Perhaps both.
“Oh, a bookstore!” Reiju gasped, continuing to pull Rei along without hesitation. “Ooh, I could bring back something for everyone to read!”
She paused for a moment, Rei almost crashing into her before flaring her AT Field so she didn’t accidentally run over her only friend. “Ah… wait. Um. Do you know how to read… uh… Indian, Rei?”
“The AAA Wunder had system language packages and translation software for two hundred and forty nine languages,” Rei spoke up, using some of the technology systems she had in her own rigging to project her system menus into the air- it felt more natural than just utilizing them within her own mind as a sort of HUD. The haptic feedback of actually moving one’s hands to select items was a valuable part of modern technological design, after all. She pursed her lips, scrolling through her options. “The machine translation algorithms utilized by the MAGI Achiral system is considered the most advanced translation in the world, and is capable of deconstructing and localizing regional dialects and slang terms.”
She stopped for a moment, taking the time to read the sign above the somewhat ruined building they stood in front of.
Ruined in that one wall was entirely blown out and there were the remnants of a long since decayed blood splatter on the ground near said blown out wall.
…
Mm.
An uncomfortable reminder that the people she had chosen to befriend were the aggressors in the worldwide war they were embroiled in. Perhaps if she managed to convince more of them that diplomacy was the way to go…
Ah, but that would invite unnecessary retaliation from human governments who would make emotionally driven demands as part of petty revenge… not that humanity did not deserve to hate Abyssals for killing innocent people en masse, but revenge and displays of emotion and anger were best handled on an individual basis, rather than by entire governments trying to take advantage of people’s grief for perceived profit and power.
Regardless. Peace was an uneasy topic, and it seemed at the moment that the vast majority of Abyssals just wanted to be left alone.
Perhaps there was some way of suing for peace, but not with current doctrine being the main source of interpreting the world for all other Abyssals not on the island of Sri Lanka. If humanity demanded the execution of Abyssal leadership, that would only incite even further retaliation because, so far as Rei had seen so far, most Abyssals had an almost slavish devotion to their Princesses and Demons, and if Reiju’s stories were right, occasionally went berserk in the wake of their sinking. That, or they became drifters that got picked up by other fleets. Or they got sunk. Or they became listless and unresponsive. Or they became pirates trying to gather enough strays to become minor Princesses in their own right.
It might have happened once or twice prior, but news was sporadic and fragmentary among Abyssals and Reiju thought that might have been hearsay honestly.
Regardless.
Rei had been standing there silent for a far too awkwardly long moment, and so she fixed her attention on Reiju again, flashed her the smallest of smiles, and began walking towards the ripped open doorway of the bookstore. “Would you like me to read to you, Reiju?”
“Oh, that’d be great! Ooh, ooh! Make sure you pick some stuff that we can take back home too! Some of this stuff looks totally water damaged, but I bet there’s still some good picks that the others haven’t taken!” Reiju grinned, following Rei into the store and digging through the fallen books and dusty mess that littered every surface.
It was strange, being in this almost liminal space- seeing the cracks in the walls filling with plantlife, feeling the missing presence of what should have been humans coming in and out on a daily basis, knowing that the people that she called her allies and friends at the moment had been responsible for turning those humans into a fine mist…
Tsk.
Hm…
Ah, some readable books. Not enough char or water damage to render them illegible, and they had held up well enough to at least be read through once.
Hm…
Had Reiju found anything?
“Oi! Rei! Rei! Can you read this for me!?”
Well, that answered that question.
Rei turned to face Reiju, tilting her head slightly as she found a book shoved vaguely at her face.
Well.
Alright then.
If Reiju wished to spend the afternoon reading picture books, so be it.
Rei sat down on the closest thing approximating a chair, cracking open the book while Reiju sat down next to her.
“Raiit Mein Paanv. Feet in the Sand. A bilingual poetry book about the stories of the sand and the sea. Story by Sakshi Singh…”
Chapter Text
Somehow, over the course of barely a day or two, Rei had become something of a central figure among the island’s population of Abyssal girls. It turned out that the vast majority of them actually couldn’t read, and any comprehension of language that they already had was some kind of instinct that came across from their home port and any experience they had over the course of their limited lifespans.
Some of them spoke Hindi. Some of them spoke English. Some of them spoke Indonesian. Some of them spoke Filipino. Some of them spoke Japanese. Some of them spoke Spanish, Portuguese, French, Farsi, Tagalog- any number of languages in the entire South East Asian area, mostly. Whatever language they were most fluent in seemed to be based on the language of the island they spawned near, or whatever language their Princess spoke, whichever came first.
Fortunately, the MAGI Achiral system could keep up with literally thousands of processing threads at once, which meant that she could listen to every girl’s questions and answer them without fail.
Strangely, despite the language barriers, most of them could understand each other without fail- not a single translation error nor misunderstanding in sight, as if they were all speaking the same language.
Perhaps it had something to do with the way the echoes in their voices flickered out of sync with their actual words? Carrying meaning in a subconscious shared language made entirely out of the frequency modulation of their speech?
Who knew. Reiju would have called it Spooky Abyssal Stuff and been done with it.
Rei, meanwhile, was of the mind that there was some kind of science to be done with it, though she would need more samples and probably more robust testing equipment to actually figure out what was going on.
Regardless.
The fact that Rei was capable of reading just about anything did not go unnoticed on the Sri Lanka Harbour Installation, and in short order she was reading everything from science books to nursery rhymes to poetry to young adult fiction to, after hours, smut.
Why the submarines had such a wide and varied collection of sexual reading material was entirely beyond Rei’s comprehension, but she saw no real problem in reading it aloud and answering questions about what sex acts were what to her audience of blushing submarines.
Lewdmarines, as Reiju sometimes called them.
It was… nice, in a way.
For all that she was thoroughly aware that the Abyssals thought nothing of continuing a largely futile war against humanity for the sake of a few leaders’ grudges and half-cocked needs to destroy and subjugate, the vast majority of the ones here in Sri Lanka were… peaceful.
Surprisingly kind. Thoughtful.
They were human in a way Rei hadn’t expected, in that they actually knew, somewhat, how to act like regular people.
She’d seen them play games, barter, tell stories, help each other, comfort one another… There was seemingly a love of learning as well, with several of them finding fascination in all manner of topics.
There was, of course, the downsides and the darker parts of their burgeoning society as well- they tended to not understand restraint very well, and arguments became physical more often than not. Their punishments for stepping out of line started at light mutilation and only became worse from there.
The Abyss magnified negative emotions, it seemed, and while none of them seemed to take the violence personally, she’d seen more than a few of the weaker members of the pack flinch when others raised their hands or swiveled their guns or stepped too close.
Perhaps that was the feeling of empathy, that Rei did not particularly like seeing what she almost thought were innocent girls being hurt. Something about the mind that had shared its thoughts with her seemed to dislike violence at all, unless given a target that they saw as somehow deserving.
Odd and contradictory, that line of thought was.
Still, it was about the closest thing to a proper moral system that Rei currently had access to, until such a time that she developed her own.
Perhaps she would gain some insight into a way to convince the Abyssals that their war was better off ended than not somewhere along the way.
Perhaps.
At the very least, she could attempt to help the Abyssals on the island with their tasks while she was here.
For example, fishing.
“Ah, I see,” Rei murmured, holding onto one end of a net as she moved underwater with the same grace that she moved through the air. “The process is much more complicated than it first seems… not quite like trawling for fish on a human boat…”
“Mm!” the rather excitable girl who had identified herself as Harbour Princess Fleet So-Class Submarine No. 0342 (aka HPS Yotsu) nodded, holding up the other end of the net as she led Rei further into the depths surrounding Sri Lanka. “It’s cuz the sea here is shallower than a lot of trawling locations, mm! It gets way deeper when you go south, but we’re supposed to stay inside our perimeter so we don’t get caught, mm!”
Yotsu wiggled her hand a little, sort of going back and forth a bit. “I mean, we can go deeper to catch some of the tastier fish, but we can’t stay out long- there’s always enemy subs waiting to catch us off guard, mm!”
“I see,” Rei nodded, then began moving away from Yotsu slowly, exactly as the submarine had described. Apparently, the way the Abyssals liked to catch fish was to grab whatever spare netting they still had or could make with what they had lying around (usually thin steel cabling due to lighter materials often breaking under the strength of their hands), go into the depths, and then perform some kind of wide encircling maneuver around large schools of fish. It was somewhat akin to trawling, but with usually two submarines and a much shorter distance covered.
With Rei’s help, though, it was much easier to catch the entire school before they could scatter- her ability to move underwater wasn’t produced by boilers and propellers, it was simply the flexing of her AT Field that allowed her to reach nigh impossible speeds while supporting the net at maximum width. The water would not cavitate behind her, the net would not break from excess strain, and the fish would be none the wiser until they found themselves cooked and served on an Abyssal’s makeshift plate. Usually with a sauce made of oil and various crushed up minerals and metals for flavor. Sometimes they used human spices, but it wasn’t like they were particularly proficient with the various powders and plant bits that they kind of threw around haphazardly.
Regardless, it didn’t take much longer to reel in a catch, and it took even less time to haul the entire thing onto the cold metal plating of one of the slipways closer to the heart of the installation. Fortunately, they didn’t have to descale the fish nor gut them, seeing as most Abyssals chomped through steel like it was candy and drank oil to the point where the bitterness of fish guts and the toughness of fish scales was a non issue.
Rei, meanwhile, was of the mind that she should start introducing them to more proper foods, moreso than just cans of whatever preservative laden instant foods survived their initial assaults and bombings of inhabited islands. Who knew that Spam and cans of instant soups and noodles were usable as currency when one was smuggling supplies back and forth through rival territories, Shipgirl patrol routes, and open ocean that didn’t have the benefit of being under the shield of a Princess’ scrambling aura.
The only problem with Rei actually trying to introduce the installation to real food that was cooked properly and actually tasted good was…
Well…
She had no idea how to cook either.
The MAGI Achiral system was fully capable of figuring out how to cook of course, but the problem was that it didn’t have any of those instructions or procedures built in, and would have to reconstruct them with input data and extrapolations based on whatever instructions she managed to find.
The other problem was that Rei wasn’t entirely sure she would be able to cook. Just because her Wunder-crew was fully staffed with onboard kitchens didn’t mean that the skill transferred over, and the galley staff were mostly there to reheat military grade rations that had more in common with factory produced sludge than they did the foods they were based on.
The end of the world had not been good for food production, nor had it been good for people learning how to cook.
…
Also, her commanding officer in a previous life had been Katsuragi Misato. If that wasn’t an objective curse on her future cooking endeavors, she didn’t know what would be.
So.
She’d need to find some cookbooks first. And practice. And make sure that her galley staff were competent. And also figure out if the Harbour Princess was at all interested in setting up agriculture and animal husbandry. Rei had seen more than a few chickens running about, as well as some still living livestock, and if they could restart some of that industry, then it meant that Harbour Princess had a much stronger base for negotiating with other princesses than just what bits of scavenged nonperishables they could find. Fresh meat, fresh proteins and grains… not a necessary part of running the war effort at all- not for Abyssals- but well cooked meals with fresh ingredients would likely be an invaluable morale booster.
…
All of that was predicated on the idea that Rei wanted to help the Abyssals with their war, though. Which she wasn’t sure about.
War seemed wasteful, unsustainable. Likely to end in the total depopulation of the planet if Abyssals and Shipgirls kept throwing themselves at each other without end. There were only so many ships to pull from the water, after all…
…
“Are you okay, Flying Fortress Princess-sama? You were staring into space for a while, mm…” Yotsu interrupted Rei’s thoughts by waving a hand in front of her face, looking just a bit contrite for doing so.
“I am fine,” Rei answered quietly, noting that, at some point, her own autopilot had activated and started running her through the process of dumping fish carcasses and oil into a truly gargantuan communal pot- one of several- and she had just been about to start throwing in lumps of what seemed to be car tire chunks, bits of scavenged steel, a block of what was likely compressed aluminum cans, and also seven jars of ghee into said pot. “I was thinking.”
“What about, mm?” Yotsu asked, tapping her chin curiously as she upended a whole oil drum’s worth of brackish seawater into the absolute travesty that was their cooking setup. Rei, idly, thought to herself that somehow having gained the title of Flying Fortress Princess due to explaining her specifications to her curious onlookers was… a bit ridiculous.
She probably wasn’t even an actual Abyssal Princess. She’d yet to manifest a storm, after all, and only superficially resembled an Abyssal in the first place. Her AT Field could likely manifest a storm if she wished, but she only had fragmentary memories of seeing a water manipulating angel a long time ago and likely wouldn’t be able to recreate that kind of proficiency without further examples.
“Food, I think,” Rei finally spoke after yet another moment’s pause to deliberate. “Do you enjoy human food, Yotsu?”
“I haven’t had much of it, Floating Fortress Princess-sama,” Yotsu answered with a mild shrug. “Harbour Princess-sama likes to give us treats when we do well, but sweets only go so far, and Hoppou-hime-sama takes priority for our Princess, mm.”
“I see.” Rei nodded slowly, stirring the slowly simmering sludge and wondering just why it smelled so good to her. Was it because she was also a ship, and was aware of it now? But she had no need to eat, no need to drink, no need for excess fuel- she was, after all, powered by an N2 reactor as well as being made entirely of Core crystal. She would try it regardless, though, seeing as it would be impolite to refuse if offered. “I was thinking about agriculture. Farms. Perhaps instead of scavenging human food as occasional treats, it may be best to create sustainable food sources.”
Yotsu tilted her head. “What’s a farm, mm?”
…
Rei was suddenly struck with the knowledge that, ah, yes. The Abyssals around her were literal children in terms of their worldly experiences, and almost all of their estimations of human culture came from digging around for scraps and usable knick knacks in the bombed out ruins of said culture.
Right.
“A farm is…” Rei trailed off, pausing in her stirring as she brought up the words to explain. “An area of land that is devoted to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops.”
She paused for a moment, using her internal systems to project an image of the most basic farm she could imagine. “Humans use them to grow many kinds of plant based foods. You may have seen some of them while scavenging. Rice. Vegetables. Fruits. Wheat. So on and so forth.”
Yotsu blinked, not entirely comprehending what Rei just said. “... Food grows out of the ground, mm? Does oil come out of the ground…?”
“Yes,” Rei nodded. “Oil and bauxite can be found in underground deposits all over Earth. Steel is created by adding carbon to iron. All ammunition is created with resources that are refined from deposits found around the world.”
Yotsu tilted her head slightly. “But… we don’t… have access to any of those, mm? I’m… not sure where a lot of our resources come from…”
“I do not know either. Harbour Princess said that the Abyss provides, but that material must be sacrificed in order to gain more later down the line,” Rei almost shrugged, then shook her head. “Regardless, it is clear that the Abyssal war effort relies on human industry to proceed, even as it attempts to destroy all of humanity.”
Yotsu frowned. “But… if we need humans to make the stuff that we use to kill humans… then…”
She almost fell off of her stepstool, her singular visible eye glowing with violent shock. “Without humans… we’ll run out of supplies… and then that means... the entire war is useless… we… don’t… have a reason to fight!?”
Rei blinked. “It appears that way, yes.”
Yotsu swooned, almost crumpling to the ground before catching herself on a nearby wall. “I-I… I can’t… what have we been fighting for then!? How are we supposed to take revenge on humans for treating us like garbage if we need them to survive!?”
“I do not know. I am sorry,” Rei murmured softly, kneeling down by the almost panicking submarine in order to give her an awkward hug. “It will be okay.”
“Uwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah-!”
That seemed to be the wrong thing to say.
At least she could provide a shoulder for the girl to cry on.
Chapter Text
“Flying Fortress Princess.”
“Yes, Harbour Princess?” Rei asked, looking up at the towering woman who’d so graciously provided a temporary home for her and Reiju. Reiju, who was currently wandering around giving out snacks to an assorted bunch of listless and somewhat depressed looking Abyssals, because news had spread rather quickly about how much of their war of revenge against human folly was… well. Useless.
Futile.
A slow march to an inevitable slow and painful, drawn out death. Abyssals had none of the training, knowledge, or ability to continue using human infrastructure if they managed to kill them and the Shipgirls all at once. The devastation would be total, and more than a few humans would detonate explosives to deny resources to the Abyssal war machine. Overextension into the mainland would just result in nuclear fire once their forces had extended too far past the cover of a Princess’ storm, and most Abyssals were sitting ducks on land- even with a full screening of anti air cover, they only had so much vertical range at any given time, and modern bombers could exceed that range handily until they adapted.
The war itself, if they managed to push onto large enough portions of the mainlands around the world, would become an increasingly uphill battle from the uphill battle it already was. Victory would just result in a silent planet of reclaiming nature and twisted corpses, with swathes of once useful items and knowledge turned to dust and blood and ruin and char in the wake of the Abyssal war machine.
After that?
The most intelligent of Princesses could likely begin a rudimentary recycling operation, taking in ruined machinery and figuring out what it did, absorbing it into their installations to try and eke out some of the productivity of industries now gone. But it likely wouldn’t be enough. Abyssals had a psychological compunction against leaving the water for too long, favored staying drenched instead of dry- or if they were dry, then they needed easy access to the water anyway. Abyssal society would never extend into deserts or high mountain ranges, would never get past some land barriers. They wouldn’t be able to move at high speed on land and a total human extinction would mean that roads and vehicles would be nigh useless as well. Supplies would end up at risk all over, scavenged stores of remaining steel and aluminum and copper and oil and other necessities of Abyssal life would run out- old buildings torn asunder for raw materials, scraping every last bit of usable hydrocarbon out of everything…
And then what?
If they didn’t manage to relearn how to set up global scale industry before all of their resource scavenging came to an end… what then?
Food shortages. Tensions rising. Infighting. The already tense rivalries between some Princesses escalating into full on civil war across the globe. Dozens of Abyssals sunk improperly- their corpses not left to the Abyss, but cannibalized for food and repairs. The Abyss wouldn’t be able to replenish those that were not sunk into the depths, and new ships needed resources to summon anyway.
A spiraling, slow collapse of constant war, constant tension, constant anger. Violence and fire, hulls blown apart, magazines burning inside out, engines leaking oil from fatal hits. Total collapse. The last Abyssals alive would be those who could either hide out long enough, or those who could run far enough. They would have nothing left by that point, scavenging the remains, picking apart the fraction of a fraction of what was left…
And then?
Everything would run dry. Usable material would become a thing of the past.
Turning on each other one last time, the last Abyssal alive would either die of her own wounds and sink into the Abyss forever, or slowly rust away from starvation, no fuel left to try and find a resource deposit that hadn’t been ripped dry.
And then it would be over.
A silent world where nature would slowly reclaim it all. The Abyss, fallen quiet again with no more grudges, no more hate, no more violence left to be done.
The thought of it was horrifying, and even the most basic explanation of, “If we kill all humans, we can no longer get resources from their industry” seemed to get through to most of the Abyssals on Sri Lanka to the point where they became…
Listless.
Unfocused.
Introspective.
More than a few had started crying.
All because Rei had said the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, and Yotsu had blurted out everything to her concerned sisters who had wandered over, wondering why one of their submarines was crying while making dinner.
Perhaps this was the emotion of regret.
She didn’t like it.
“How likely is it that your prediction comes true?” Harbour Princess asked after a long moment of deliberation, sitting across from Rei and pursing her lips. Her massive clawed hands folded together, and her crimson eyes bored into Rei’s own, searching for any hint of falsehood. “If we win… if the Abyss takes humanity down to the very last soul… will we all truly die? Will our own infant society become nothing more than rust and ruin?”
Rei pursed her lips, running through scenarios with her MAGI systems. Her mind flashed, data blinking faster than any other computer on the planet. She took a deep breath without needing to, then nodded slowly. “I have calculated twelve thousand, six hundred and thirty two scenarios, broadly arranged into four categories. One: Abyssal Victory. Two: Kanmusu Victory. Three: Human Victory. Four: Neutral Peace. In all scenarios of Abyssal Victory, where humans and Kanmusu are exterminated to the point of securing total control over the world’s oceans and/or landmasses… it becomes increasingly likely that Abyssal society will not last through the next century.”
She paused, projecting a seemingly meaningless series of graphs and charts, data visualizations and statistics layered in dense patterns before their eyes. “In the event of total human extermination, the number of losses the Abyssal side takes will hamper any attempt to rebuild the necessary industries for survival. Steel. Oil. Bauxite. Production of those three resources is complex and varied, and while Abyssals can take any kind of steel, any kind of oil, and any kind of aluminum rich material… there is a finite amount of it that exists in ready form for use in installations, and as rations. While it is possible to substitute organic foods for short to medium stretches of time, it becomes increasingly improbable that there will be enough surviving material left to support Abyssal expansion inland. Buildings have a finite amount of metals to rip from their walls. Organic material decays. Rust. Oxidation. Industrial processes are needed to recycle any waste material produced by Abyssal biomechanic operation. Continued use of storms will hamper the growth of plant life and scare away animals, making sustainable hunting and gathering nearly impossible. It is unknown if any Princesses have enough of a knowledge base to recreate the equipment and machines necessary to refine and process dug up resources. All of Abyssal society would be on a timer, and if no one is working towards long term sustainability from our current position onward, there will soon be no sentient life left on this planet in the event of an Abyssal victory.”
Harbour Princess pursed her lips, processing all of that in silence. She sat there, mulling it over for some time, then took a deep breath and hid her face behind one hand with a long suffering sigh. “Why the difference between human and Kanmusu victory?”
“If humanity manages to adapt their technology such that Abyssal advantages no longer work to protect the bases and installations the war relies on, then it is increasingly likely that those installations, bases, and resource deposits will swiftly find themselves reduced to radioactive ash, without the aid of Kanmusu,” Rei explained, folding her hands together. “Based on data gathered, humans become exponentially more cruel when they decide a group of a useful minority has outlived its purpose. A total Kanmusu victory will result in the destruction of all Abyssals for however long it takes for new grudges to concentrate until they are strong enough for the Abyss to restart the war, and will likely cause the Kanmusu to be hailed as heroes for the rest of their service lives. They may find themselves used in conflicts with other nations once the Abyssal threat is over, but that will likely not result in total annihilation. Human victory without the aid of Kanmusu has a small but likely chance that humanity will turn on the Kanmusu and order their decommissioning once they are proven obsolete. Based on data gathered from hearsay, Reiju’s apocryphal anecdotes, and the intake data of the local Abyssals, it takes a significant amount of resources to maintain a Kanmusu- more than it does to maintain the exact same ship class, due to them also having wants and needs beyond simple maintenance and crew rotations. If they are anything like a standard Abyssal, their appetite for their daily maintenance and upkeep including exercise and training is well into the dozens to hundreds of tons of material, or gargantuan piles of food as well. Human governments and corporations are stingy, greedy organizations. They will attempt to cut off that which they see as standing in the way of profit. If humanity turns on the Kanmusu, then it is likely they will fall to their grudges and become Abyssals, restarting the war and likely resurrecting all capable Abyssals in short order.”
She paused once more, then stared directly at Harbour Princess, eye to eye. “And again, leading to the slow, painful extinction of all sentient organic and biomechanical life on this planet.”
Harbour Princess looked like she had just sucked on a lemon. “So our only option is peace, somehow.”
“Yes,” Rei nodded, then shook her head. “Peace will be increasingly difficult to achieve the longer the war goes on. It will be difficult, and will invite extreme scrutiny and hostility from agitated humans who will not be happy with the war stopping, because they want revenge for the deaths of those they loved, or will just hate you in general. Humans will be scared of you, will be either incapable or unwilling to make intelligent decisions at times, and will largely treat you as monsters in a very flimsy cage. Some of them will demand concessions of you, and you will need to grant at least some of them lest the humans decide to continue the war even if you declare a surrender. It is, by far, the most difficult to achieve outcome, and requires a vast majority of Abyssals to agree within short order, but it is not impossible.”
Harbour Princess nodded slowly, crossing her legs and looking thoughtful. “What about the traitors? Will they even accept any peace offerings? They seem to just want all of us dead no matter what, so they can pull their own compatriots from the wreckage of my sisters…”
“I do not know. The MAGI system is powerful, but not infallible. The data I have on the Kanmusu is limited in scope, and is likely faulty to begin with,” Rei shook her head. “But if they become aware of Abyssal sapience then it may be that they will accept you. There is nothing to do but try.”
Harbour Princess sighed. “I was afraid you would say that. Then… may I ask you a favor, one Princess to another?”
“Yes,” Rei answered shortly, starting to run out of words now that they were back to having a conversation that wasn’t just her explaining as much of her data predictions as possible as efficiently as she could.
“If you need to learn more about the traitors to know if they will accept us…” Harbour Princess chewed her lip, then vaguely motioned outwards toward the sea. “... I want you to find one of their bases and gather what data you can, then run the numbers again. I… I do want peace… but I do not know how. And I do not know if I am smart enough to do right by my girls. So please… help me?”
Rei nodded, performing a snappy salute remembered from the archives of the MAGI. “I will not fail you, Harbour Princess.”
“Please, call me Wanko. One friend to another,” Harbour Princess smiled, wiping a black tear from her eye. “Thank you, Rei.”
“Affirmative, Wanko-hime,” Rei nodded again. She smiled ever so slightly, standing up and leaving after her friend had left.
Ah, so this was determination.
She rather liked the feeling.
Chapter Text
“Oiiii! Oiiiiiiii! What’cha doin’!?”
“I am creating a secure communications beacon for Harbour Princess,” Rei answered, watching Reiju saunter up as if she hadn’t been put on the Re-class patrol routes for the last few days. She shifted her hands a little, tightening a bolt and idly eyeing the sort of ramshackle tower she’d made. It didn’t particularly match most known forms of historical communications arrays, but then again, she was jury rigging together a thing out of spare computer hardware and replacement parts that she’d had in her cargo bays. It wasn’t even going to communicate using most known forms of data transmission- it would resonate directly with her core, allowing Rei to pass messages back and forth without anyone else being the wiser, at distances best measured in Astronomical Units than anything else.
She didn’t particularly plan on going that distance, but harvesting metal rich asteroids would be a viable way of delivering extra materials to the Sri Lanka installation should they wind up cut off from Abyssal supply lines. A single asteroid would provide all of their metallic necessities for centuries, likely, if she brought back the right one. Synthesizing long chain hydrocarbons from asteroids would also be rather easy now that she thought about it… her own specifications as the AAA Wunder allowed her to synthesize her own spine into a reality warping device when paired with the abilities of Evangelion Imaginary. Using the MAGI and some of the surviving textbooks in Sri Lanka (plus what she could find on the internet once she hooked that up too), she could assist Harbour Princess in creating all of the facilities she’d need to…
Ahem.
“You spaced out for a second there,” Reiju stated idly, kneeling down in front of Rei and vaguely looking up at the antenna reaching into the sky. Not far, only a few meters, but it was still a strange sight to see when everything else around the entire coastal perimeter of the island was the comforting and familiar lines and angles of Abyssal construction. It felt so… hastily manufactured. Colorfully strange. Like parts of it had been forcibly bent into place after having previously been something else. “So… communications, huh?”
“Yes. This is a specialized AT Field signal transducer capable of sending and receiving messages from one AT Field to another,” Rei explained, tapping away at her keyboard through some kind of reflex that, probably, was due to one Akagi Ritsuko’s position as Deputy Commander upon the Wille. At the very least, it allowed her to parse the data that her own systems provided as fast as it came, and it meant that she could design these things on the fly with limited resources and have them work perfectly more or less on the first try. “Once calibrated, I will be able to hear messages that no one else can, and when I send a response, the signal will appear here, in this antenna, and be transmitted via radio waves to this laptop computer.”
She paused, holding up the screen towards Reiju for perusal. “I have taken care to reinforce this device such that Harbour Princess can use it without fear of breaking.”
Reiju stared at the screen, furrowing her brow slightly. “... But why is it Skype?”
Rei tilted her head. “It was the most functional form of long distance video communication save for proprietary NERV or otherwise government software at last recollection. Is there something else?”
“Uh, yeah?” Reiju pulled out her own laptop- a much less large and surprisingly slab shaped thing, one that was… pretty cheaply made all things considered, but the boys on the Icehole Express had all chipped in to get her the best one they could afford. Plus the satellite internet service thingie that it was hooked up to. That wasn’t important right now, though, because she turned her screen around and showed Rei the most important thing to ever grace online telecommunications. In her opinion, at least. “Check it out, it’s called Discord! I heard about stuff like Teamspeak or like… Teams or whatever, but Discord has all these funny lil pictures n’ stuff! It’s great. Oh, and, and, I keep getting gifted free Nitro so I have a cute little profile decoration!”
It was a little hoodie with cat ears. It was adorable. Her profile picture, though, was a screenshot from one of the first shows she ever watched online and had since moved on from. Sailor Moon had been a great first binge watch.
Ahem.
Rei blinked. “... I do not understand.”
“You don’t have to, here- can you connect that thing to wifi?” Reiju asked, leaning in a little and squinting at the computer with curious eyes. “Whoa, wait, what version of Windows is this? It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen…”
“It is a proprietary build of Windows Impact, the first build of Windows released in 2006 after the Windows XP source code was dug up from the ruins of Microsoft headquarters. It has been in service for approximately twenty two years,” Rei explained, completely unblinking. “I assume that there has been a differing historical record, and that Windows Impact is not compatible with the operating architecture of modern computing.”
“... Yeah something like that,” Reiju finally hissed out after a moment, letting out the words with a strained tone going right through her clenched teeth. Yikes. “... So we might have to get you a new computer. Or somehow flash a modern version of Windows 10 to your PC.”
She paused, considering the ramifications of what Rei had actually just said for a second. “... Wait what? What do you mean the ruins of Microsoft!? Windows Impact!? Different history!? Huh!? What!? Huh!? I mean I know some of the self-summons are weird about talking about alternate timelines but what the fuck!?”
“I am from a timeline where humanity was nearly destroyed in the year 2000. The resources to create new technology were rare and concentrated around disaster relief, especially after the four years of nuclear global resource wars following the initial Impact,” Rei half-explained rather blandly, taking Reiju’s computer out of her numb hands and tapping away at the keys idly, before reaching into her storage hold and using her onboard systems to reconfigure a spare cable so that it could make the jump between the ports on Reiju’s laptop to her own. What was this one using, USB? Rei was not particularly familiar with that format, but some quick searching via a far more effective version of Google Search than her own system had allowed her to find a fresh disc image, and a query to the MAGI Achiral systems brought forth the instructions for flashing a new operating system.
It meant that she would have to rewrite the code that allowed the computer to interface wirelessly with her AT Field antenna, but she could reconfigure both to be wifi compatible using the specifications and data sheets she found online already, and by studying the signal architecture going from the laptop to Reiju to a satellite in orbit…
It wouldn’t take long at all to reprocess everything and repackage it all at once.
Ah, the joys of a large, global information network. Shame that the network in her timeline had been withered to just about nothing during her active period.
Silently, Rei thanked the leftover muscle memory she had gotten from Deputy Commander Akagi for how fast she could type, and how fast she could reconfigure the wireless internet protocols of her own scrapped together technology. She could likely use her AT Field as some sort of carrier, piggybacking off of the existing signals flying all over the atmosphere and using her MAGI Achiral systems to provide global high speed internet connections to both herself and anyone on the receiving end of…
Rei blinked. “... Ah. I will have to key in parental controls into any additional computers I give out. I have just realized I am fully capable of using my onboard systems and AT Field to provide unrestricted internet access to all information on Earth.”
Reiju stared, looking at Rei as if she was insane for a moment. “I- yeah. That’s. That’s pretty important. Uh. Some of the fresh summons really shouldn’t… be lookin’ at all the stuff humans put on the internet…”
She shuddered. She’d seen too many things. Horrible things. Unholy things. Things that made her realize that the human capacity for evil and sin was far greater than any Abyssal could ever imagine. Things that also sometimes made her tingle a little in a way that her Princess must never know about.
Ahem.
“S-so um… what was that about… um… the apocalypse?” Reiju asked, trying to find a safer topic to think about. “What do you mean by Impact? I could hear the capital letters in that. Did some big ol’ meteor hit the planet or something?”
“No. The Second Impact that nearly wiped out humanity initially was caused by the Katsuragi Expedition team,” Rei explained, shutting her laptop and setting it to the side for later work. Explaining things to Reiju took precedence right now, as it were. “The abbreviated version of events is that, when the earth was formed approximately five billion years ago, a massive object known as the White Moon impacted earth exactly where the original continent of Antarctica would form, carrying with it the ancient superbeing known as Adam. There are multiple Adams relevant to the story of my timeline, but regardless, the first Adam is the most important. Approximately four point five billion years ago, as Adam waited for the conditions of earth’s surface to reach a point where it could begin seeding life upon the planet, a second object, the Black Moon, impacted earth in what became known as First Impact.”
She paused, looking at Reiju and projecting an abbreviated timeline of events into the air for her benefit, complete with animations to go with it. “First Impact was a violent collision that resulted in the creation of Luna, earth’s current moon. The being upon the object known as the Black Moon was dubbed Lilith, and in the collision, an object known as the Lance of Longinus was used to seal Adam away into dormancy so that Lilith could become the progenitor of all life on earth. In the year two thousand, the Katsuragi expedition found Adam’s body in modern day Antarctica, guided by a set of prophetic scrolls that detailed rituals and predicted events for the next several thousand years such that the owners of the Dead Sea Scrolls could attain complete immortality and complete their Human Instrumentality Project. Second Impact occurred when the Katsuragi expedition accidentally awakened Adam, causing its body to violently detonate in mere moments and destroy earth’s biosphere. Antarctica was reduced to an open stretch of ocean. The seas became red and toxic, rising dozens of meters and causing tsunamis and flooding across the planet. Most of the biospheres around the planet were reduced to fractions of what they once were. The planet’s axis was thrown off course, leading to violent climate instability and strange weather conditions year round. Only one person survived the expedition: a girl who would grow up to become Commander Katsuragi, captain of the AAA Wunder twenty eight years later.”
For emphasis, Rei projected a simulation of Second Impact just to drive home how apocalyptic of an event it truly was. “In the immediate aftermath of Second Impact, the world’s surviving nations pointed fingers at each other to try and ascertain who was at fault for ending the world. Nuclear wars followed, as all surviving nations tried to scrounge together resources and come out on top. Peace came after, once the survivors realized how futile aggression was in the face of oncoming extinction. In the year two thousand and fifteen, after almost a decade of preparation and scientific breakthroughs, giant monsters known as Angels began attacking the city of Tokyo-3 in an attempt to cause Third Impact and reduce all life on earth to that which was born of Adam instead. This was all part of the organization SEELE’s Human Instrumentality plan, though the details of all the events that happened that year are largely irrelevant in the long run.”
Pausing again, Rei swallowed and pulled a plastic water pouch from her hold, sipping it lightly to wet her parched throat. “Near the latter half of the year two thousand and fifteen, a boy named Ikari Shinji, the pilot of a giant war machine called Evangelion Unit-01, faced off against the strongest Angel yet seen. In his attempt to rescue his fellow pilot Ayanami Rei from the core of the tenth Angel, he caused Near Third Impact with nothing but emotion and sheer force of will, but was stopped at the last second. Third impact continued, though, and in the wake of nearly the entire planet dying all at once, a man named Kaji Ryoji gave his life to stop it entirely. Fourteen years later, Fourth Impact nearly occurred when Ikari Shinji, reconstituted from the core of Evangelion Unit-01, and fellow pilot Nagisa Kaworu, almost fell directly into SEELE’s trap and restarted the process of an Impact using Evangelion Mark 13. In the wake of that additional failure, NERV Commander Ikari Gendo, Ikari Shinji’s father, initiated his own plan for Human Instrumentality by causing what became known as Additional Impact, wherein he used two spears and two Evangelions to open the Doors of Guf into the anti-space beyond, freeing the being known as Evangelion Imaginary and allowing him to convert all of humanity into one organism within what would have been a sea of souls. Ikari Shinji stopped him with the aid of Commander Katsuragi, with Commander Katsuragi sacrificing herself and I, the AAA Wunder, to deliver my spinal cord to Ikari Shinji, who was inside of Evangelion Imaginary with Ikari Gendo, in the form of the final spear, the Spear of Gaius, or alternately the Spear of WILLE. The final Impact, also known as Neon Genesis, erased all Evangelions from existence, and reset the universe to a place where humanity could be happy without things like Evangelions or Angels existing.”
Rei wound down slowly, trailing off and looking at Reiju with an utterly calm expression. “Did that answer your question, Reiju?”
Reiju only had one thing to say to… all of that.
“What the FUCK!?”
Chapter Text
“Be safe! Watch out for red water, that’s where all the insane Princesses are!”
“We will, thanks mom!” Reiju called back, waving towards the slowly disappearing form of Harbour Princess as she and Rei made way from Sri Lanka’s installation and out into the open ocean again. “Stay safe! Byeeeee!”
They sailed out a bit, just long enough to see the installation vanish over the horizon, before Reiju pulled up beside Rei and sighed. “Bleh… good to get back out on the ocean again, huh? Always feels weird when I spend too long doing nothing…”
“I suppose,” Rei answered noncommittally, supporting Reiju’s weight against her side with a quiet huff. “I am glad that I do not need to carry more Wa-class transports this time. While the weight was negligible, I do not think I enjoy having to carry too many moving passengers at once. The lift calculations become exponentially more taxing the more I have to take into account a passenger’s changes in aerodynamics.”
Saying that, she leveled a flat stare at Reiju, who had the good sense to look a little apologetic.
“W-well, it was just freaky, okay? Ships ain’t supposed to jump, let alone fly!” Reiju pouted, completely forgetting the fact that the I’s, Ro’s, Ha’s, Ni’s, and Na’s liked to jump around like particularly violent whales. Or sharks. Or dogs. And that Reiju had once told a story about some Shipgirl drop kicking and then throwing an I-class Destroyer. “Just because you throwing me at a buncha humans was fun, doesn’t mean I enjoy flying!”
She huffed, crossing her arms. “I didn’t even get ta kill those stinkin’ humans… ugh. I know we can’t win the war or we’re screwed, but sheesh, some of ‘em definitely deserve to die.”
“Perhaps,” Rei continued to be rather noncommittal, raising an eyebrow at Reiju before checking their position with a ping to the world’s satellite mapping systems. Ah. Perfect. Already making good time towards the Maldives, which meant that they were due to lift off now. “Prepare yourself. I will cradle you.”
“Oh boy, here we go again…” Reiju groaned, raising her arms hesitantly and watching with slowly mounting dread as a massive pair of mechanical wings sprouted from Rei’s back, alongside her proper rigging- the strange shapes of her hull, the triangular bit that might have once been a bridge, the entire freakin’ tail- all of the mechanical shapes sliding perfectly into alignment as if they’d been there the entire time. Every single time she saw it, she had to wonder… just how powerful were Rei’s guns? She’d gotten some kind of specifications info dump at some point, but there was a difference in knowing academically what something could do… and actually seeing it in action.
Even if that action was just range shooting for calibration purposes.
“AT Field full power. Spacetime control activated. Balance calibration complete. All controls green. All flight surfaces green. All systems green. Power core at full potential,” Rei intoned, taking a deep breath as she wrapped her AT Field around Reiju and spread her wings wide. “AAA Wunder, ready to launch in three. Two. One.”
“WhoooooOOOAAAAAAAAAAA-SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!”
And there they went, flying off into the deep blue sky on a halo of light, leaving rainbow trails shimmering in their wake and letting the world know of their departure with the sharp crack of a sonic boom. Reiju’s immediate vocal protest was lost to the empty sea, and the vanishing trail they left behind.
Onward and upward they went, passing straight up through the atmosphere while Rei used her now permanent connection to the world’s information network to keep an eye on just about anything connected to the public internet. Not that she needed to at the moment, but it was nice to simply bask in the overwhelming output of the information superhighway, knowing she had all the world’s scientific data at her fingertips (well, after she broke through a few rudimentary restrictions on what she could or could not view), able to peruse it at her leisure and let it percolate through the MAGI Achiral systems to become fully integrated into her mind.
There really was all sorts of interesting information there- some scientific papers on dissections of Abyssal wrecks done when they were killed on land, a few scientific papers written on the internal biology of Shipgirls and how it was similar to Abyssals. Anatomy and purpose of a Shipgirl’s fairies. The materials science papers done on the properties of Abyssal steel. The material properties of Shipgirl steel and how it interacted with organic bodies. Preliminary tests for using Shipgirl steel as the source material for things like collarbone replacements due to its complete inability to be rejected once inserted…
Oh, there was also some old research into cloning done in Japan, though she only skimmed over the title. Something about the viability of using an old attempt at making cloned humans as soldiers in the Abyssal War, though that idea was scrapped ages ago once Shipgirls began appearing.
Idly, Rei wondered if they’d ever made viable human clones.
Hopefully not. She didn’t want a repeat of the Ayanami Series, or the Shikinami Series, or the Dummy Plug Plant. That would be… too awful for this surprisingly… easy to live in… world she’d found herself in.
Hopefully, if there was a Shinji or a Rei or an Asuka in this world… she hoped that they were doing well, wherever they are.
Rei didn’t particularly have any knowledge of what happened with Ikari Shinji after he’d initiated Neon Genesis, but she got the feeling that everyone had gotten a better deal after he had gotten rid of all Evangelions and Angels from the world.
That said, though, she did wonder sometimes…
Why was it that Sailwitches seemed to have magic that brushed right up against her sensors as AT Field manipulation? Why was it that Princesses had a blood pattern of not quite Blue? Why was it that she felt as though this was still the world of her origin, just… slightly different from how she remembered leaving it?
… Okay, a lot different. For one, Antarctica still existed and was still a landmass. The seas weren’t red except where there were insane Princesses plotting their revenge on a world that had forgotten them as so much yesterday’s trash. Sometimes literally. There were still fish. Still living things in the ocean. The world hadn’t been knocked off-axis. The moon wasn’t nearly twice as close to the planet as it should have been, nor was its surface marred by a bloodstain nor a bunch of floating crosses nor an atmosphere. There was no NERV. There was no GEHIRN. There was no SEELE- not that she knew where they deigned to show up most of the time.
No Evangelions. No Angels. No Spears. No Lances. No Moons. No Jet Alone. No quadrillion dollar defense budgets, no Tokyo-3, no Tokyo-2, just Tokyo.
Though, there was a naval base in Japan that called itself Tokyo-3 somewhat unofficially…
…
That bore some investigation, actually. She’d have to figure out who was in charge there, and why exactly they chose the name. If there was any chance that there was some leftover echo of Evangelions…
Ikari Shinji did not cause Neon Genesis just so there could still be Evangelions in the world making people suffer.
Rei, quietly, accepted the fact that she probably wasn’t supposed to exist either, and yet here she was.
“Ne ne!” Reiju’s voice interrupted Rei’s thoughts as they flew northeastward at supersonic speeds, only the bubble of Rei’s AT Field allowing Reiju to actually speak at the moment.
Sure, they both had radio now, but unshielded radio transmissions in this part of the globe would likely get a large force of Shipgirls attacking them. Or at the very least, jets. Not something Rei wanted to deal with again, even if she had railguns now.
…
Actually, the railguns made it more likely to cause fatalities, because her firing controls were MAGI assisted to hit enemy weak points. And the weakest point on an encroaching fighter jet was the pilot.
And her railguns could fire up to mach ten at full charge, with an approximate maximum fire rate of five rounds per second assuming no loading issues or power fluctuations. Each projectile was approximately twenty one cubic meters in volume, made of proprietary blends of materials, and depending on what type of ammunition she loaded, her maximum impact force was somewhere on the order of half a kiloton of TNT.
Per shot.
With five shots per second.
With five railguns.
It would take approximately one second of sustained fire with all five guns to equal a disaster on the scale of Hiroshima in terms of energy released, if not total area destroyed or lives claimed.
So.
Actually firing her guns was something best left to party tricks and demonstrations of overwhelming military superiority- of which she had not needed to do any yet, but she surmised that there would be at least one person out there who wanted to compare firepower and underestimated just how much force she packed into five guns.
Hopefully her sheer displacement would make most balk at that, but she really hoped she wouldn’t have to-
“Beh! Stop ignoring me!” Reiju interrupted her thoughts again, this time by reaching up and poking her right in the cheek. “I was asking how long it’ll take before we get there!”
Rei sighed. “Approximately two hours at our current pace. Why do you ask?”
Reiju just shrugged, pulling out her laptop and idly shaking it a little. “Wanna watch a movie? I’ve got a lot of ‘em downloaded!”
Rei tilted her head slightly, then adjusted their position in space such that they could both comfortably sit in something akin to a reclining position, her rigging moving in a way that was… somewhat mindbending to think about… in order to maintain proper flying angle even while Rei herself was completely out of position.
Thank goodness for AT Fields making it so aerodynamics wasn’t something to worry about.
“Great!” Reiju grinned, getting comfortable next to Rei and setting the laptop down on… thin air, really, but the shimmer of an AT Field beneath it meant that it was, effectively, a table for now. “Oh, so, what do you wanna watch? I’ve got everything! Superhero stuff, action movies, romance, horror, thriller, slasher, spy flicks, heist flicks, chick flicks, kid’s movies, family movies, animated movies, teen movies, anime, cartoons, really creepy 3d animated knockoff movies from foreign studios, bollywood, short films, tokusatsu, film festival previews, porn, hentai, 3d porn, 2d porn-”
“Please do not show anything pornographic,” Rei looked at Reiju somewhat incredulously, wondering why the Abyssal had so much porn saved on her computer. “I do not wish to see such things at the moment. What is your favorite movie?”
“Oh, that’d beeeee…” Reiju trailed off for a moment, then hummed. “Actually, now that I think about it, wouldn’t you have a lot of the same movies back in your timeline that I do? I mean, the world only ended in the year 2000, right? Stuff like Terminator would still exist, wouldn’t it?”
Rei shrugged. “I do not know. My memories of the time before Second Impact are fragmentary at best, and focused entirely around military installations in and around Japan.”
Reiju hummed thoughtfully, rubbing her chin as she considered those words. “Oh, then lemme introduce you to my favorite movie of all time! Terminator 2: Judgement Day~!”
Rei blinked, tilting her head once more. “Would we not have to watch the original, then? Watching a sequel before its associated first movie seems out of order, is it not?”
Reiju snorted, rolling her eyes and waving Rei off while she navigated through the folders of her laptop. “Pssshhh, tell that to Star Wars nerds. Half their shit is out of order, and the rest of it sucks mega shit.”
“I see.”
Rei did not, in fact, see. She had no idea what Star Wars was, and at this point was probably better off not knowing what it was at all.
“Anyway, behold! One of the greatest movies ever made with 80s technology!” Reiju grinned, throwing out her arms for emphasis… and then clearing her throat. “... is there any way to like… make it darker? And make the screen bigger?”
“One moment.”
A flex of her AT Field later, and the entire area around them dimmed to night time levels, with the laptop screen now appearing approximately six times larger, to match that of a large television.
“Sweet! Now hold onto your ass, because this is one of the best movies ever!”
Chapter Text
“Rei-rei!”
“Hoppou-chan!”
“I missed you!”
“I missed you tooooo!”
Rei, quietly, stood off to the side as Reiju picked up the diminutive form of her Princess and swung her around as though she were her Princess’ big sister rather than being said Princess’ direct subordinate.
It was utterly heartwarming, and also adorable, and also so sweet that Rei could literally feel it in her teeth.
… That may have been the soda and chocolate they had snacked on while watching Terminator, come to think of it. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in some time, though a lack of plaque and bad breath had made that seem like a secondary concern, honestly.
Ahem.
What was she doing again? Ah yes, staring at Reiju and the Northern Princess’ reunion, which was less like “rogue ship returns from a month lost at sea” and more “big sister returns home after going missing for a month”. There was laughter and cheering, and somehow the atmosphere felt warm despite it being winter in the north latitudes to the point that the sea became flooded with icebergs and ice sheets. Even Reiju’s sister ships seemed to be overjoyed that Reiju was back, and they crowded around so that they could all lift Reiju into the air and carry her along.
Aww.
How nice.
Rei, meanwhile, simply stood there like a ghost next to the several shipping containers she’d released from her hold when they landed, feeling rather awkward about essentially intruding on a scene that she wasn’t invited to.
None of these people knew her, and while she would have liked to introduce herself, they seemed rather caught up in welcoming their missing sister home. They hadn’t even paid any attention to the things that Harbour Princess had tasked Rei with bringing over for them.
Idly, Rei swept her attention over the rest of the island, her AT Field pulsing out gently and covering kilometers worth of area with a fine, nearly imperceptible shimmer of reality warping under the weight of her soul. It didn’t do much, at the moment. All it did was let her keep track of life signs, movement. It let her know who had a soul and who didn’t. Not that not having a soul meant someone was less of a person.
Ikari Shinji was adamant about that, and Rei supposed it had rubbed off over time.
Regardless. There were… oh?
That was interesting…
The entire population of the island was approaching just under four and a half thousand people. While she was now keenly aware that the Dutch Harbour settlement on the island was only part of the settlement known as Unalaska, that population only made up approximately four thousand and three hundred people, give or take a few dozen.
The remaining population of the island was somewhere over a hundred ship class Abyssals, taking up the entire formerly uninhabited portion of the island in what was mostly small patrols and a rather spread out series of installation buildings.
There was even a road cutting across the island leading into town, which meant that Reiju wasn’t the only one of her siblings to be okay with humans, it meant that the Northern Princess herself was completely fine with the presence of humanity.
That… also implied that the Princess known as Northern Little Sister was also like that, considering how close she and Northern Princess were, according to Harbour Princess.
Three Princesses, all entirely willing to live among humans. How strange.
From what Reiju and Harbour Princess had said, the majority of Princesses were entirely unable to let go of their grudges against humanity, and a fair amount of them were only half sane to begin with- some of them were even fully insane.
Rei, idly, wondered just how many Princesses there were out there, and if humanity was really capable of winning a war against a nearly endless tide of insane, maddened monsters that were only sometimes capable of being normal, sane, rational beings.
She’d heard some gossip while they were on Sri Lanka, having listened in on a few conversations here and there- nothing private, of course, but things that weren’t particularly meant to be broadcast to everyone.
Ships talking about some of their sisters in their classes, how some of them were fully insane to the point where they were indistinguishable from each other, how some of the rage maddened Princesses fielded armies of utterly insane lesser Abyssals, how some of the ones who survived past the deaths of their Princesses broke down and became inconsolable in the wake of their minds clearing from that fog…
Rei had to wonder, just what was the whole picture behind Abyssals and their strange collection of contradictory behaviors. The Abyss did not seem to overly pull at one’s negativity- those that wanted to be decent people were more than capable of being kind and gentle, and even some of the more animalistic Destroyers that Rei had seen were fully capable of acting like large dogs instead of vicious war machines. At the same time, there was a learned culture of violence and corporal punishment, likely due to them not knowing any other way to punish insubordination or reckless behavior. Even then, those punishments weren’t taken lightly, and were only given out when it was deemed absolutely necessary. Some Princesses were driven insane by their own grudges, and that insanity caused their followers to become maddened and nearly lose their own sapience in favor of endless rage as a result.
Some Princesses, though, were sane in their rage, and used it to wage war the likes of which had not been seen for the better part of a century, more or less.
It was a strange and contradictory set of behaviors, but taken as a whole… Rei did suppose the range of behaviors mapped approximately to humanity’s darker desires and emotions, overall. If she had gleaned appropriate data from the anecdotes and apocrypha that she had access to, of course. One Princess’ explanations on the broader aspects of Abyssal society, plus Reiju’s own anecdotes, plus the occasional eavesdropping that she had done did not particularly constitute a well thought out nor well researched sociological trial.
In fact, she would likely be laughed out of any kind of sociology based conference based on her findings, if only because those people would not believe that Abyssals were capable of actual reasoning and higher thought.
Most of the ones that actively threw themselves against Shipgirl and human support forces were rather mindless, according to Harbour Princess. She herself had apparently once been like that, but sinking a few times had brought some clarity… and also there had been a large ripple of… something in the water a few years ago that had, apparently, cleared some Princess’ minds of their endless grudges. Harbour Princess had no clue what that event was, or if there was any proof that it happened, but the effect was that she was capable of actually taking Sri Lanka and holding it.
…
Harbour Princess had stated that the burst of light in the dark had brought clarity, not any larger sense of calm or morality to the forefront.
Regardless.
All of that was to say that Northern Princess, also known as Hoppou, and Northern Little Sister, also known as Georgie, were outliers compared to the minimal data she had on other Princesses.
Rei, idly, felt as though she should begin interviewing every Abyssal she came across- or, at least, find some way to record interactions beneath each Princess to see just how many of them were capable of reason, capable of peace, capable of higher thought, or just capable of mindless violence.
Speaking of Hoppou, though, Rei noted that there was… a surprisingly large amount of human paraphernalia scattered around the area. Not just crates of food or random debris that the Sri Lanka installation had- stuff that had been scavenged from the ruins of the settlement that had once been there- but actual goods.
Clothing in good repair. Posters for local bands, taped to random walls. An entire fleet of working vehicles, all kept shiny and clean (if… a bit dented). The sign from a McDonald’s, affixed proudly to the roof of what looked like some kind of storehouse. The entire installation even looked more like an actual town rather than an eldritch military base like Harbour Princess’ installation. Each ship seemed to have a grouped or individual habitation area, decorated with rocks and shells and various human odds and ends- one of them had a Christmas wreath up, even. The roads were paved and the main street lead off towards town, as she’d noted before, but there were sidewalks, road markers, stop signs- all of which bore characteristic Abyssal markers, but overall aside from the defenses near the shore, the entire area could be mistaken for an eclectic town instead of a military base.
Interesting. Very interesting. Wait.
Were those humans nearby? She’d almost missed the soul signatures because they were standing near a pair of Abyssals, but it looked like there were… actual humans… in an Abyssal installation… with books. No weapons, no armor, just brightly colored winter clothing, a vehicle nearby, and books aplenty.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
Rei, silently, continued to keep watch for a moment longer, then located the nearest seating area (and, that spoke volumes as to the human influence on Hoppou, that her installation had benches everywhere) and waited for someone to inevitably take notice of her.
Not that it seemed anyone would- even while Reiju was busy regaling the crowd with tales of her battles against the evil traitor Shipgirls (which were mostly made up and riddled with inconsistencies), no one turned toward her or even noticed her moving.
Even when Reiju revealed that she’d brought back a load of goodies and snacks from Harbour Princess, no one noticed her sitting there, calmly watching a whole pack of Abyssals dive towards the shipping containers and start wrestling for their favorite treats, with Hoppou at the head gobbling down chocolates like a wild animal.
… Those treats wouldn’t last a day, at this rate.
Well, not that Rei was of any mind to judge anyone for their eating habits. Rei had yet to actually eat much of anything in her existence as a Shipgirl, being that she was entirely sustained by her own reactors and assorted power sources.
Note to self, eating is required in order to understand what being a human is like.
Second note to self, she should really turn her ability to feel hunger back on, just in case, so she didn’t make a social faux pas related to eating.
Third note to self… unrelated to anything about eating, she should infiltrate a Shipgirl base sooner rather than later, as Harbour Princess needed information to help decide whether or not she wanted to vie for some kind of peace. Should Harbour Princess declare neutrality (with conditions), or even take the side of humanity, that would provide an incredible foothold on the other side of the war, granting the ability for Shipgirls to launch out of India and much of the surrounding areas once again, instead of having to constantly wonder if stepping foot in the Indian Ocean would draw the ire of several hundred high tier Abyssal ships all at once- to say nothing of Ourang Medan’s ability to project her magic as a form of soft defense against more advanced human weaponry.
Even their natural defenses against most modern types of technology failed in the wake of getting nuked from across the planet, which necessitated soft defenses in the form of magic instead- making their entire installation untargetable, making humans and Shipgirls alike forget it was there, using illusions to obfuscate where it was…
Rei had heard the information more or less third hand, but humans had figured out that nuclear weaponry still had some, albeit a rather diminished, effect against Abyssals. It wasn’t enough of an advantage to justify lobbing the world’s nuclear arsenal at every Abyssal base they could even remotely pin down, but it meant that a large enough infestation had a high chance of getting sunk by a brand new sun… if not for the myriad of factors preventing such a thing.
Hadn’t Reiju once said that all Abyssals could submerge up to at least 600 meters, even if it was dicey for non submarines?
Regardless…
The nuclear survival capabilities of Abyssals could be interrogated later. Not tested, but at the very least someone would have information for her. Probably.
If she knew where to look.
…
Maybe she could hack into a military database? The MAGI Achiral system did have a set of routines suited for that duty…
Ahem.
“Oh- and this is Rei! Say hi Rei!”
Ah, they’d finally noticed her.
Rei blinked, coming out of her scattering of uncoordinated thoughts and waving at the crowd with a gentle smile. “Hello, my name is Rei. It is nice to meet you.”
And then she found herself bowled over by approximately forty thousand tons of battleship condensed into the shape of a three foot tall child.
Oof.
Chapter Text
Northern Princess- or rather, Hoppou- as it turned out, was quite the imperious little princess. On the one hand, she played the part of an innocent little child, easily influenced by the things she saw and prone to wild flights of fancy that usually petered out after a few hours or days at most.
On the other hand, she was the head of a military installation and everyone knew it, and she took great pride in making sure the entire installation ran as she saw fit. Which meant that, for all that Hoppou liked coloring books and sweets and watching movies, she also had a strangely technical grasp of military tactics, patrol schedules, expansion routes, sea lines, and secure communications procedures. And a bevy of other things related to being an installation, most of which Rei actually did not possess much of a working knowledge of.
Having Commander Katsuragi’s memories was all well and good, except most of those memories were of chugging beer, being a general disaster of a woman, and spending roughly half an hour once every few weeks yelling at a teenager (or a group of teenagers) to not die and please for the love of whatever god existed please let this plan work or we’re all dead.
So.
Most of her military knowledge was half remembered texts from Misato’s college of choice, and long since faded muscle memory. Also, most of Misato’s knowledge of military tactics was best put towards fighting giant monsters… of which there were startlingly few in this world.
Rei, idly, thought that she should run a refresher course on all things military, and perhaps spend a few days (or weeks) perusing Wikipedia for their sources. If there was a benevolent god out there, they proved their existence by having Wikipedia exist. She could spend hours drifting through articles, catching up on all the information she missed over the last twenty… one years.
Apparently, the year was 2021, the Abyssal War had started in 2015, and the article on the so-named Blood Week (or, as its title on Wikipedia proclaimed, “Abyssal Destruction of the Hawaiian Islands”) dated the event to the exact date that, in another timeline, Ikari Shinji would have arrived in Tokyo-3 alongside the Fourth Angel, codenamed Sachiel.
Rei, idly, wondered why she felt like the being known as Sachiel should have been both the Third and the Fourth Angel, but put that out of her mind in favor of thinking- what a coincidence it was that Central Princess appeared and attacked Hawaii the same day that Sachiel would have attacked Tokyo-3.
How odd. And… something that bore further investigation, perhaps, alongside a number of other strange observations. Abyssal magic did feel an awful lot like some form of… not quite degraded, but perhaps… sidegraded? Lower power and intensity in favor of a wider range of more eldritch, ghostly effects?
Regardless of that, Rei had, in the moments after meeting Hoppou, been more or less bodily dragged around by the little girl- despite the fact that Rei outmassed her by quite literally a factor of almost forty to one, she found herself helpless to resist the whims of a small child that really, really, really wanted to show Rei her favorite places in Unalaska.
Surprisingly, despite being shown around a school and a church and an airport and some grocery stores and a skate park and so on and so forth… there was no explanation for why there was a McDonald’s sign somewhere in Hoppou’s little township on what had once been called Egg Island.
According to Rei’s access to Google Maps, the closest McDonald’s was thirteen hundred kilometers away.
It was, genuinely, a mystery.
Rei had even asked where the sign had come from, and Hoppou had just shrugged and said that Reiku had brought it back a week ago and wouldn’t explain where she found it. Just that it was in her hold.
Also, Rei had begun categorizing the ships she had seen, their names, and who they belonged to- something she should have done earlier, but at this point it only seemed fitting that she actually try to remember their names.
Which also meant that, apparently, Reiku had no relation to Reiju, because while Reiju was Northern Princess Fleet Elite Re-Class Aviation Battleship No. 0010, Reiku was actually Northern Princess Fleet Elite Ra-Class Destroyer No. 0009.
Reiju’s actual older sister Re-class was just named Nines. Then, as Rei had soon found out, there were also the Re-classes known as Hachi, Lucky Seven, Roku, Marugo, Marushi, Tres, Dos, and Shodai. And then all of Reiju’s younger sisters, numbering up to twenty- Eleven, AB, Misfortune, One-Four, Ichigo, Juuroku, Dancing Queen, Juuhachi, Juukyu, and Tsu-Rei.
Plus the assorted other Ra’s, I’s, Ro’s, Ha’s, Ni’s, Ho’s, He’s, He’s, To’s, Chi’s, Ri’s, Nu’s, Ru’s, Wo’s, Wa’s, Ka’s, Yo’s, Ta’s, So’s, Tsu’s, Ne’s, and Na’s that were floating around in various numbers.
Rei, privately, thought that there might have been more Abyssal classes than it was really worth trying to keep track of.
And then there were all of the Imps.
Startlingly well behaved ones, as it were- they actually seemed to like hanging out with humans, and didn’t go out of their way to start shelling Unalaska at range. Unlike the Imps on Sri Lanka, which had no compunctions against targeting anything that they thought would make a satisfying boom.
… And then there were the… Escort Fortresses.
Rei had no idea what they were supposed to represent, but there were quite a few of them scattered around and it was… definitely something to behold.
Idly, whilst Hoppou was distracted by other things and Reiju was off catching up with her sisters, Rei pondered to herself if she had any ability to be a carrier. Theoretically, it was possible, right? The Abyssal Carriers around her had multiple methods of launching planes, though they mostly just spat them out of whatever large orifice they had on their bodies.
It turned out, a Wo-Class Carrier’s large mushroom shaped hat-thing was not, in fact, a hat. It was a vital part of their body and they could not physically remove it without destroying their ability to actually launch aircraft.
They could, however, dismiss it as part of their rigging, and thus appear slightly less like some kind of strange wizard.
Oddly enough, the cape was part of the rigging too.
Weird.
The pants and bodysuit were, interestingly, not part of the rigging, though the cane was.
Honestly, what part of an Abyssal counted as rigging or not seemed entirely arbitrary, and frankly it also seemed to vary between even sister ships.
Reiju’s raincoat was actually just a raincoat reinforced by her own Abyssal nature to act as armor even when she swapped it out for a different coat (which, apparently, she had many of here at her home base) (today’s coat was bright pink with neon blue flames, and kind of hurt to look at). Reiku’s entire outfit was her rigging save for her underwear and stockings, which was…
Interesting.
Reiku’s sister Jackpot (Northern Princess Fleet Elite Ra-Class Destroyer No. 0007) just had her boots and more standout Abyssal features disappear, leaving her in pretty much just a normal gothic lolita outfit.
So on and so forth.
What made Rei curious about whether or not she had some capacity to act as a Carrier, though, was because she had discovered an… anomaly in her inventory records.
She had access to something that, by all rights, she wasn’t supposed to have.
Something that should have only been given to one specific Evangelion.
An Evangelion that, apparently, she had in her hangar, alongside several others.
…
Why did she have multiple Evangelions in her hangars!?
Why did she have so many things in her inventory that weren’t supposed to be there, and why was she capable of deploying them?
Rei, genuinely, had no idea what the hell was going on with her body, only that apparently she seemed to have more cargo space than the AAA Wunder should have allowed, and that a lot of that cargo space was filled with things that weren’t supposed to be in the AAA Wunder.
But most pertinently were the several UNAF Close Air Support VTOL Aircraft YAGR-3Bs in her hold, the successor YAGR-N101s, and, most strangely, the multitude of RS Hoppers stored away in hidden pockets all over her rigging.
What.
Was she?
Every time some answer came up about her own existence, it seemed to dredge up another five questions. She wondered what she was before she met Reiju, and then found out she was the AAA Wunder, and had to question everything she knew about how she even existed in the first place and her own place in the world. She thought she was just a normal Shipgirl, but now she found out she had access to things that shouldn’t exist in her inventory, nor should they exist at all in this world?
Rei sighed, wondering what surprises would come next. At least she could say that she was well armed, even if said arms were confusing, contradictory to what she should have been able to field, and also far weaker on their own than the actual weapons of mass destruction she was supposed to have mounted to her wings.
If she launched an Iowa-class Battleship as a missile packed with N2 explosives, would the missile turn into a Shipgirl partway through the flight, or would it remain just an inert battleship until it summarily turned an entire portion of the sea into a vapor cloud and a kilometer wide fireball?
Questions that Rei, honestly, hoped she would never have to answer.
Most of her weapons were useless to her at the moment anyway- what did she need with an Evangelion? What did she need with RS Hoppers? What did she need with VTOL Aircraft? What did she need with her inbuilt Nekozame-class Orbital Assault Craft? What did she need with her railguns?
Frankly, she would have been happier existing as just a mortal person, wandering the world in search of a place to call her own. Perhaps she could be a farmhand or a laborer, working out her sweat from her bones as she slowly accumulated a purpose in life to fulfill. Maybe she would find a nice girl to fall in love with, like the faulty Ayanami Type had with Shinji. Maybe she would find a nice boy instead, like Shinji.
…Mm, no. Boys held no interest.
Girls were better.
Although… girl Shinji…?
“I think that’s the first time I have ever heard you giggle like a pervy old man,” Reiju interrupted Rei’s thoughts, looking at her friend’s slightly glazed eyes and the thin drip of blood coming from her nose. “... You were thinking something gay just now, weren’t you?”
“I was imagining a boy I knew in passing as a pretty woman,” Rei answered without a hint of deception or shame, wiping the slightly orange blood from her nose and looking up at Reiju. “It was a pleasant mental image. More pleasant than I would have imagined it to be. Mm… She would look… startlingly like me, I think… but with brown eyes and brown hair…”
“... I’m not sure I want to know,” Reiju deadpanned, then leaned over and poked Rei on the forehead. “Anyway, c’mon. Get up. It’s almost time for lunch, and Char promised us hotdogs today!”
Ah yes. The Ta-Class Fast Battleship, Char. And her sisters Sear, Burn, Smoke, and Blaze. All of whom had a fascination with cooking, despite not being Tenders of any sort. Surprisingly good at it too, despite their names.
“I have never had a hotdog before,” Rei stood slowly, following Reiju idly while mostly staying lost in her own thoughts- Reiju’s rambling washing over her in easy waves as she recorded the conversation with half an ear to be properly archived in her memory later. She made appropriate noises whilst Reiju talked, though she didn’t really have much of an opinion on whatever Pacific Rim was, promising to watch it with her when they both had free time.
At the same time, Rei pulled out an RS Hopper, just to see if it would follow her mental commands, and set it floating in place at her shoulder, ready to project its AT Field at a moment’s notice- autonomous defense, perfect for long range protection or boxing in enemies.
“Whoa- what is that!?”
Ah, yes. It had also gathered Reiju’s attention. Of course.
“An RS Hopper. Its function is to act as a remote extension of my AT Field, allowing me to project it from a distance and use it as a shield for others, or box in opponents without coming close and risk tainting my own AT Field,” Rei explained idly, poking the little jellyfish-like thing and noting somewhat awkwardly that, for some reason, it had a tiny… clone of her… inside. One that was… chibi-shaped. Adorable, but strange. And… saluting to her?
How odd.
“Coooooool…” Reiju gushed, staring at the piece of literal alien technology with starry eyes. “Can I play with it?”
“Later, after lunch.”
“Oh shit, right! Hotdogs! C’mon, we gotta go or they’re gonna run out!”