Being on the Atlantic coast kinda kiboshes most of the canon cast showing up. The Japanese girls will have their hands full in the Pacific, and AFAIK all the canon American shipgirls are part of the US Pacific Fleet.
In no particular order ... Massachusetts spent time in the Atlantic, including a duel with Jean Bart. Ranger spent most of the war in the Atlantic. Brooklyn patrolled the Caribbean and helped with Operation Torch in North Africa. Tuscaloosa didn't join the Pacific side of things until January 1945. Washington spent the first few months of the war in Britain, helping patrol against Tirpitz.
Yeah, and there's also the fact that we're a dozen years into a war and the navy has a lot more ships (so historical unit compositions are off the table). Anyone could run into Grace in theory, and then there are people who might seek her out for various reasons and with various degrees of effort (distance) involved.
Smith had gone up to settle the bill, meaning that no one had to come over and deal with me to handle that. That got us out of there fairly quickly, thankfully.
The food had been good, at least.
Smith and Merika had peeled off for the night, as had the remaining two doctors. So with that, I followed Alden and Barker to the shipgirl dorms.
"We're in Room 106." Barker said. "So hopefully everyone's cool with you sleeping there."
"So how many other girls do I need the approval of then?" I asked. "And what happens if we don't get it?"
"There are 22 other girls in 106. And if we don't get okays from everyone we can crash in a study room for the night." Barker shrugged.
"Actually, is this allowed?" I asked. "You gonna get in trouble for this?"
"Why?" Alden shrugged.
"Aren't there security concerns?" I tried.
"I mean, Katie, Louise, and Henrietta aren't on patrol. So if the brass asks, getting into a slugging match with an Iowa and two Baltimores is on the agenda of precisely zero carriers, at all times." Barker shrugged. "Plus whatever else a dozen DDs and CLs can toss in, too. Anyone who would complain lost their stars or left."
"Ah." I said, shoulders moving forward.
"Relax, Louise might try to give you a makeover but that's about it. If you don't want it, start talking about your video games and Sophia or Kirka will bail you out." Barker said.
Alden gave me a thumbs-up.
At that point, we were in front of the building, a large, boxy version of the other buildings on the base.
"I'll grab some sleeping gear." Alden said, as we badged in. "Amelia, can you show her in?"
"Sure." Barker said.
Like the SMF, the dorms had a pure concrete construction, with a layer of grippy epoxy paint directly on that. It felt reassuringly solid. The ceilings were higher than normal, enough so that I could raise my hands up and not hit any of the ducts and conduits hanging below the actual ceiling. The corridor quickly went into an intersection, and Alden went ahead and Barker guided me to the left.
A couple of women - shipgirls, I'd guess - gave me strange looks as we moved. Barker waved. Two women were practicing a joint juggling routine or something like that, resulting in one of them getting hit in the head with a ball.
"Sorry!" I called out to her.
The doors were spaced a long distance apart, and the stretches of concrete were decorated with banners representing the units, as well as posters. Most of the posters were shipgirl units cosplaying as power rangers, magical girls, Halo Spartans, or knights. There was even a Symphogear-themed poster, that being the only magical girl series I knew more than the title of. Could I snap a picture to send to Luna?
The poster was labeled "BatDiv 52: Believe in justice and hold a determination to shell." Four battleships posed, dressed as Hibiki, Tsubasa, Kanade, and Maria. They had even completely decorated their riggings so that they looked like parts of the correct symphogears, and held prop weapons in their hands. (Except for whoever was cosplaying as Hibiki.)
Next to the door for room 106 were a pair of posters. Alden was on the closer one, dressed with the other women of DesRon 283 as magical girls of some sort. She'd styled her dark blue hair in a pair of short braids, as opposed to her current short ponytail. She was wearing a matching colorful dress.
Barker was on a poster further down the wall, dressed as Princess Leia. She hadn't had to anything different for her hair, but pale blue didn't match the original's brown hair. Instead of holding a blaster, she had the right wing of her rigging held up near her hand. She'd put shrouds on her 5-inchers to make them look like the Princess's blaster. "DesRon CCCXXVI: A New Shipgirl" was printed in the Star Wars font.
I turned back from the poster to Barker.
"What? Unit cosplay is fun." She shrugged.
"You think I can take a picture of one of these?" I asked.
"Yeah, sure, which-" She cut off as I turned around and headed back to the Symphogear one.
"Luna will probably love this one." I said, snapping several pictures.
"Big fan?" She asked.
"She has a limited-edition poster of the Mechvaranus Trio on her wall. The one that was only released in Japan." I replied.
"I have no idea what you're talking about, but yeah that's some shipping cost." Barker nodded.
"Let me show you." I said, pulling out my phone. I searched for "Symphogear Yumi Kuriyo Shiori Wedding Poster." Then I showed it to her.
"Huh." Barker said. "We'd probably start getting flak from above if we started making posters like that. Plus coming up with a pose for a six-person polycule is a lot harder than three. And Marcia and Cadance are already married, so doing a shoot in wedding dresses would attract the ire of their wives."
I was blushing again. I could just tell.
"What's this?" Alden asked, glancing at my phone screen. "Goals, am I right?"
Definitely blushing harder.
"Okay, stop teasing the poor girl." Barker said. "And besides, you're monoamorous last I checked."
"Okay, you got me there." Alden shrugged, then pulled a bundle out of her sleeve. "Happy belated launch day. It's a sway cot."
"Uh... thanks?" I took the bundle. "How is this a cot?"
"It's got a bunch of segmented rods that you put together." Alden explained. "Plus, they sway a bit. It's like being tied up at a pier."
"Huh." I said.
"There is also the floor." Alden said. "We can grab some shipping pallets, too."
"And what she means by that," Barker sighed. "Is that before these got developed, we spent a lot of time not using our provided bunks and instead sleeping on shipping pallets, because those were comfortable, and we had experienced something like them before. Honestly beds are nice but I actually had a tendency to wake up in the middle of the night feeling like I'd crushed the thing."
"Huh." I said again.
"It should last you at least a decade. Mine has." Barker said.
"Wow, thanks." I nodded, and put it in my payload bay.
"Yeah, let's see what the rest of the dorm thinks of you." Barker said, and we walked the last distance to Room 106 again.
Barker knocked on the door. "Everyone decent? Our B-mint guest is here."
A few muffled affirmatives sounded out. Barker opened the door, passed through herself, and then gestured for me to enter.
I stepped through. The room was wide and not particularly deep, with the door in the middle of a wide wall. Two open wooden crates on either side of the door held what looked like beanbag chairs, and these were immediately followed by tall metal cabinets, with a reinforcement along the edges and marked with yellow-and-black "WARNING: COFFEE MACHINE" stickers. The far wall was undecorated and painted white, with a few projector images on them. A few curtains were bunched up against that wall as well, with tracks to partition off the room to some extent.
I stepped into the room proper and found myself with a lot of eyes on me, metaphorically speaking. Significantly fewer eyes than I had, physically speaking.
"Uh, hi?" I asked, at everyone's weird looks.
"What?" A woman with purple hair drills asked, pointing at me.
"Yeah, this is her." Barker said.
"But... are we sure she's a ship?" Another woman asked - a taller woman, who had dressed as Tsubasa for that Symphogear poster. Apparently she didn't dye her hair for that, but she normally had it in a french braid. And her current outfit did a better job of hiding her abs and arm muscles than the cosplay did.
"I mean, the presence of things like aircraft catapults, a radar system, and the ability to float above water might be a hint." I snarked.
Both women looked a bit sheepish at that.
"Sorry about that." Not-Tsubasa said, stepping forward and extending her hand smoothly. "Katie Illinois. Nice to meet you, Miss Batoidea."
"Likewise." I managed despite her shirt showing off some of her abs, taking her hand. "So what, exactly was that about?"
"Your shipness is unusual." Barker said.
"And that means?"
"Grace, if we hadn't been told you were a carrier we would have had to guess between that and battleship." Illinois said. "We can make out your approximate size, but not much more than that."
Huh?
"Grace, can you tell what class I am?" The purple-curled woman asked.
"Err... nope. Casablanca?" I guessed.
There was a moment of silence, broken by a few giggles.
"I'm a Clemson. My hair is not fluffy enough to be a CVE. Linda Morris, at your service." She said, bowing slightly. She was probably above average for a woman, but my new height was messing with my rules of thumb.
"Ah. Nice to meet you, Miss Morris." I said.
"Yeah, you're definitely built different. We can see shipgirl silhouettes just as well as we could see ships back during our original service. And apparently you can't." Barker shrugged. "Anyway, not that big a problem."
"Yeah, I just see 'person,' I guess?" I shrugged.
"Well, that makes you better than some ex-bigwigs." Morris laughed.
"You're sleeping here?" Illinois asked.
"As long as no one objects." I said.
"I don't think anyone has a problem with you, though?" A woman with pink eyes and wavy pink hair in a straight cut said. She was leaning on a beanbag, and had another woman, this one with short red-brown hair, leaning on her stomach.
There were various glances across the dorm, with shrugs and shakes of heads.
"Yeah, we're good." Barker summarized.
"So sleepover time?" Morris asked.
"Sure." Barker shrugged, pulling out a stool from against the wall.
"Alright!" Another woman called. "Girl talk! Do you have a girlfriend?"
"Er-"
"Girlfriend candidate?" She bounded forward, getting right in front of my face.
"Cass, cool your boilers." Alden said, pushing the just-identified Cass back. Then Alden blinked rapidly - was that morse code? - and Cass stiffed and backed off.
"Can... we not?" I asked, then realized my shoulders had tensed up.
"I think Grace needs a distraction right now." Illinois said.
"Makeover or movie?" The pink-haired woman on the beanbag chair called, putting away her book.
"Uh, movie?" I said.
"Alright, one dumb action flick coming right up." Illinois said.
Cass tossed over a beanbag chair, and soon enough we were watching Hard Edge V: Phantom Ninjas.
The film started with a tough-looking young woman (short grey hair, eyepatch, bared chest except for what was covered by bandages, wearing a black jacket like a cape) getting ambushed by ninjas that could turn into mist. She beat them off using her gun, a car wheel she ripped off the only car in that alley, and brass knuckles.
"Tires don't work like that." I said, when the woman used the tire like Captain America's shield.
"Neither do arms!" Another one of us called, referencing a moment maybe a minute earlier.
"Exactly." Illinois said. "It's amazingly dumb. Precisely why I watch it." She dropped down a bag of microwave popcorn in my lap, then dropped one in Cass's, who was next to me.
"Thanks." I said, and took a handful.
As it turned out out, this young woman was Hard Edge. That was literally her name on her drivers license. The door to her office also said "freelance police detective."
"But..." I raised a finger
"Are you trying to apply logic to this?" Illinois asked, eyebrow raised. "Because that will lead nowhere."
I did my best too ooh and ahh and not think too hard about the fact that none of this made sense. The fight chorography wasn't superb, but I realized about halfway through the glacier barge fight that it was a lot more readable than other things I had been forced to watch. In between the fight scenes, there was a lot of hammy acting.
Nearly two hours later, Hard Edge's girlfriend was driving a motorcycle down the highway at well over the speed limit, Hard Edge herself was on the back with her magic pistol and flaming sword (apparently I would have to watch Hard Edge III: Edge of Yesterday for that story), and several ninjas were trying to escape with the nuclear football briefcase. And somehow, this wasn't the most confusing thing in the movie.
"That was fun, right?" Illinois asked.
"Yeah!" I nodded. I grabbed Cass's discarded popcorn bag and stood up to toss them in the trash.
"Grace! You haven't had a makeover, ever, right?" The pink-haired woman asked. Was she Louise?
"No." I shook my head, walking backwards to the trash can.
In response, the pink-haired woman patted the floor next to her. Alden looked at me and blinked something in morse code. Probably that was what her spastic eyelid moments meant. Granted, with her pinned beneath her (girl?)friend, I could just walk away.
"Sure." Once the bags were in the trash, I walked over and sat down, legs together. Louise had in the meantime had pulled out several drawers from her hold. It was an impressive setup, especially because her friend had refused to allow her to move anything below her ribcage.
Then she reached out a hand. "Come a bit closer? I want to get a better look at you."
I blushed, but complied.
"You are certainly going to be tricky. You blush black, but your lips are pink." She looked at me. "So... hmmm."
For the next several minutes, she poked at my face with various options before wiping them away. She only ever worked on one side of my face. She also explained what she was putting on me.
Eventually, her eyes lit up and she started moving in earnest, with much less erasing and a lot more placing. She also started doing both sides of my face. Then she leaned back and pulled out a mirror, keeping it away from me.
"Ready?" She asked.
I nodded, and she flipped over the mirror. I'd been... airbrushed, almost. My cheeks seemed a little sharper, and my eyes more... vivid probably wasn't the right word. My lips were a deep purple, but that definitely worked.
"Wow, I'm pretty." I could see my smile in the mirror. The sparkles in my eyelashes glittered when I blinked.
"Already acknowledged you're pretty?" Louise gave me a small grin. "That allowed?"
"Babe, some people realize they're trans before they wake up with boobs." Louise's girlfriend said, with an evil smile on her face. "In fact, some people realize they're trans when they wake up with boobs."
I raised an eyebrow, turning towards them.
"My darling girlfriend, Louise, is not exactly... cognizant of her feelings most of the time." The other woman said. "It took her nearly a month to realize that she was a woman, gender-wise. And this was after I awakened two months earlier, and I at least recognized that I was trans when I woke up and went 'I have boobs. Neat.'"
"Stop, stop, don't tell her any more." Louise started tickling her girlfriend's sides. "It's so embarrassing." Louise whined.
I giggled, covering my mouth with a hand.
"Alright." I decided to come to Louise's rescue. "Can you help me take some selfies?"
Lousie held my phone while I did some poses, including ones that I thought Zoey and Luna, individually, would like.
---------------
It was approaching 2300 hours, and I was competing against Zoey Birman (one of the few natural-born Clemsons) in the latest Street Fighter game. I was doing surprisingly well, managing to win about half of the matches. Apparently my good reaction times were already helping.
Still, it was at this point that Barker came up to tap me on the shoulder.
"Yes?" I inclined my head a bit.
She flinched and aborted her tap, while my distraction cost me a combo and Birman took advantage of that to start her own combo on me. I tried for a breakout, but then she managed to take me down.
"Game!" The console cried.
"Everyone else is done with the shower, so..." Barker said. "Our turn."
"Our?" I asked, arching my eyebrow an impressive amount, while handing Birman back her spare controller.
"Yeah, one of us needs to keep an eye on your at all times." Barker said.
"Grace." Birman looked at me. "Prepare for awkwardness."
"Yeah I figured." I groaned. "Do I have to take one?"
"Good hygiene makes your maintenance easier and faster." Barker said.
"Really?" I asked.
"Eh, the studies on that haven't properly confirmed that as an isolated effect separate from morale in general. But the research does show showers help, all other things being equal." Birman countered, raising a finger.
"Uh okay." I said.
"Do you want me to stand out of line of sight and read something to distract you?" Birman pulled out a thick book - Proteins and the Cell Membrane - 5th Ed., Vol. 3 - from her holds.
"That helps?" I looked at the tome.
"Mentally chanting this kind of information helped me back in the day." Birman shrugged. Then, at my tilted head, she continued. "I'm DD-1012. I popped back in 2020. Shipgirl Training Command didn't even exist back then. When I joined, I was the only natural-born shipgirl in my unit. And everyone else had optimized the group defouling procedures over the past four years, and... with close-knit military groups shame kinda gets relaxed.."
"So I don't have it as bad?" I asked. "Is that it?"
"Taking a 155mm shell isn't as bad as a 406mm." Birman pointed at me. "But both are still unpleasant, and having someone come over to help with DamCon is always welcomed."
I nodded and smiled at that. "Okay."
"Also, you skipped puberty completely, right. Would you like me to get in contact with another shipgirl who also went through that? There are some... issues that can crop up on the human half when that happens." She asked, eyes averting from my face at a few points while figuring out how to phrase things.
"Well." I frowned. "Honestly I think I'd want an outside perspective as opposed to a single inside perspective. I'm not built on the same blueprints you are, after all."
"That makes sense." Birman stated. "It might take me a bit to get my thoughts in order about it, though. Just... don't forget that girls who have gone through puberty two or three times are going to have their own troubles because of that."
"So you went through it twice... or three times?" I asked, accepting the prompt.
"Twice. Very nearly three times." Birman said. "I actually had my first appointment with an endocrinologist scheduled for the day I Awoke."
"You're joking." I stated.
"Nope. Some of the most awkward moments of my life happened then." Birman said, looking at me and pointing a finger. "Do you want the information needed so you can track down the receptionist I talked to that morning and ask him?"
"Nah, I get you." I smiled.
------------
"That did help." I nodded at Birman. "Thanks."
"Not a problem." Birman nodded back, her book already back in her hold.
Barker tried to tap me on my upper arms (I was that tall,) but since I heard her moving I started to turn already.
"That's weird." She gave me a look. "Anyway, I was wondering how you were going to send your friend that picture. You said you don't have her email or phone service."
I stared at nothing for a moment. "Urggggh." I groaned.
"Would you like me to send them a message?" Barker offered.
"Eh? You would do that?" I asked, turning fully around, hands clenched and up by my shoulders.
"Yeah." Barker nodded. "Grace, you shouldn't ditch your friends."
"I don't want to!" I pumped my hands, then realized I needed to lean back out of Barker's personal space.
"Alright, give me their numbers and I'll write up something to show everyone." She said, now holding her phone.
------------
A few minutes later, I read Barker's draft.
Dear Misses Luna Collins Aldrin and Zoey Zelenka,
Your runaway friend, Grace Batoidea, is currently in my care. She is physically fine. Please do not inform her gene donors of any of this information.
She would also like to apologize to you for not telling you anything, but hopefully you understand that she had no secure channels for that.
Best Regards,
Amelia Barker
"Okay." I said. "I think... that this is gonna work. Send it."
"Wilco." Barker nodded, and tapped the button.
I kept staring at the screen.
"It's nine at night over there." Barker said. "They're hopefully about to be asleep. Speaking of which, you need your sleep, young lady."
"Alright, how do I put this together?" I pulled out the sway cot.
This has been mostly done for a while... it's just i haven't published it yet because I wanted to make sure it worked with future stuff I was working on.
Yes, that is a reference to that one Sleepless Domain guest comic.
Also, sometimes it's a good idea to note what doesn't get mentioned, especially when it clashes with established assumptions.
Grace's Notes 7
Grace has revealed absolutely nothing about herself that will ever be relevant. No new abilities were discussed, no new characteristics of her biology were mentioned. This is merely a placeholder to keep the numbers lined up.
I stepped into the room proper and found myself with a lot of eyes on me, metaphorically speaking. Significantly fewer eyes than I had, physically speaking.
Honestly, the least believable part of this is 24 not all junior officers sharing a bunkroom, and that is excusable in a wartime setting where there's limited quarters and high readiness requirements (need to bunk them close enough to the port to be deployable in an emergency, and need to also bunk every other shipgirl like that).
Somewhat less so given the war's been ongoing for decades, so there's bound to have been construction of dedicated shipgirl housing... On the other hand I suppose that's also enough time for shipgirl psychology to be sufficiently analyzed to conclude that communal berthing is beneficial for morale and unit cohesion (and possibly a requirement for it), and thus shipgirl housing has been designed, or redesigned to implicitly allow for destroyer cuddlepiles.
That and/or some puritan optimists figured there's less likelihood of shenaniganry with more witnesses to convince to either turn a blind eye or take part.
Presumably, married shipgirls have more options for offbase housing.
Honestly, the least believable part of this is 24 not all junior officers sharing a bunkroom, and that is excusable in a wartime setting where there's limited quarters and high readiness requirements (need to bunk them close enough to the port to be deployable in an emergency, and need to also bunk every other shipgirl like that).
Somewhat less so given the war's been ongoing for decades, so there's bound to have been construction of dedicated shipgirl housing... On the other hand I suppose that's also enough time for shipgirl psychology to be sufficiently analyzed to conclude that communal berthing is beneficial for morale and unit cohesion (and possibly a requirement for it), and thus shipgirl housing has been designed, or redesigned to implicitly allow for destroyer cuddlepiles.
That and/or some puritan optimists figured there's less likelihood of shenaniganry with more witnesses to convince to either turn a blind eye or take part.
Presumably, married shipgirls have more options for offbase housing.
Considering that I mentioned the shipgirls used wooden pallets as keel blocks for sleeping? That's definitely a big hint that shipgirls don't like traditional sleeping arrangements.
And as far as sleeping alone goes, under what situations will a ship be completely alone and have to shut down her boilers completely? Very bad situations, that's what. Under that logic, a traditional shipgirl SI scenario will be going "can't sleep; Abby will get me" until they get picked up.
(There is also a practical reason for the arrangement, and there have been hints published so far as to what is reason is.)
And of course, this is the dedicated shipgirl dorm, specifically built for shipgirls.
As for the puritan thought... yeah that would be optimistic, because did you notice the heavy cruiser girlfriends laying on each other during pretty much the entire scene?
Have a meme:
Unless they're underway for some reason (training, deployment, etc) surface ships tend to anchor fairly near together when out to sea (with allowances for anchor chain leeway and such), and sometimes two or even three abreast in port.
Yes, seriously. There were times during my enlistment (USN) where I had to cross *three* ships' quarterdecks to get to the pier.
So warships are comfortable in what we would think of as close, communal bunking. If they put the thought into it, they'd probably call it "just like being tied up to the pier" or something like that.
As for the puritan thought... yeah that would be optimistic, because did you notice the heavy cruiser girlfriends laying on each other during pretty much the entire scene?
As for the puritan thought... yeah that would be optimistic, because did you notice the heavy cruiser girlfriends laying on each other during pretty much the entire scene?
And pardon the double post, but, that said, laying on top of a buddy inside a shared bunkroom after a hard day of work in the military should hardly be considered shenaniganry capable of distressing an optimistic puritan.
Unless there's also handholding, or something else along those lines.
Um.
[Amelia] Barker (DD-213), [Sophia] Alden (DD-211), [Linda] Morris (DD-271), and [Katie] Illinois (BB-65) are all historical shipgirls.
It appears I was too subtle for my own good here.
Missing Linda as historical is, well, I didn't give any real hints. You'd have to get a hunch and look that up.
Louise, Henrietta, and other Zoey are trans. No details were given on Cass, so she could be cis, trans, or historical.
First is biological puberty, second would be HRT caused puberty for trans people, third is their new body going through whatever age they are now with shipgirl biology.
Puberty, a thing every shipgirl experiences between between 0 and 3 times.
Historical girls that popped up in their late teens and natural borns that skip over it completely probably have it rougher than the girls that get the joy of going through it more than once.
If you start HRT after finishing puberty, that's called "second puberty." (And that's a real term) Then if you get turned into a destroyer or another small ship/boat, you get a third puberty for free as you age up to about 20~25 years old on your human layer, at a normal rate.
