It seems like it would have less of an effect, to me. George was her monarch for her entire pre-resurrection operational lifetime. He was the guy she swore allegiance to, saw his face on the currency, probably met at least once. Long though her rein has been for us, to Repulse, Elizabeth is the newcomer she's never met and only been informed of a couple weeks ago.
Re-pulsed By The Abyss (Kancolle Abyssal Re-class Repulse)
- Thread starter HarakoniWarhawk
- Start date
It's 2023 in the story; the Queen's death wasn't mentioned either way.
So either her death hasn't happened in that timeline yet, or everyone in the story so far has avoided mentioning it.
Heck, in this setting maybe the Queen is interred in the
- Location
- Europe
Worse, she turned into a shipgirl.
And I can even think up which one, even has a similar name. 😇
NHO Plushy Re-pulse Commission
NHO
Dumb is a state of existence
- Location
- ᓚᘏᗢ
Due to my persistent brain-bug of reading Re-pulsed as "Re-plushed" and to commemorate one year anniversary of the last update, allow me to present:
Commemorative full-size huggable Repulse plush toy. (an image)
BEHOLD.
Art by bastianmage on twitter, no link due to nature of his other art.
Commemorative full-size huggable Repulse plush toy. (an image)
BEHOLD.
Art by bastianmage on twitter, no link due to nature of his other art.
Last edited:
NHO
Dumb is a state of existence
- Location
- ᓚᘏᗢ
It doesn't, it just gets some sun outside the hoodie.
A means to represent that it's in the shadow of the hoodie...
Interlude One
HarakoniWarhawk
Striking from the Skies
- Location
- Holy Terra
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Let me preface this with an important announcement and thanks to Tomb Spyder for giving me the confidence to ask this.
I'll be updating this through the vagarities of my Muse, but I've also got financial reasons to try and see about getting commissioned for the shit I write. I need the money, and I'm losing nothing by trying this.
If you want to see more guaranteed Re-pulse chapters, Ko-fi link is here and the details are all there.
Music for the chapter is from Dominik Witka (Time To Level Up)
The Mariana Trench.
Abyssal stronghold, absolute depth of the ocean, and formerly a site of semi-frequent visits by Human unmanned vehicles on scientific expeditions.
Now, the Challenger Deep served as a meeting point for a cluster of murky shades arrayed in a lumpen circle, rendered uneven and disputed due to several absent members. Floating a foot above the bone-white sand if they'd possessed feet, the indistinct presences were little more than hazy outlines lit by two actinic blue spots of light in place of eyes. Calling these unfeeling pinpricks of cyan "eyes" lent them humanity and existence absent at this most hallowed of borders where the Abyss met the Ocean. A singular occult steel chain, forged of links thicker than your average I-class, rose amidst the circle's embrace to extend into the gloom whence it vanished. Some six thousand fathoms overhead, the impossibly lengthy chain terminated in an unremarkably modest floating platform used by those whose spirits lacked the critical resolve to delve into the trench and survive.
Many would loudly proclaim that the entities capable of surviving Challenger Deep were far too esoteric to regard as living beings. For the Installation Royals, linchpins of the eldritch Abyssal machine from whence the material of war flowed commanded powers far beyond mortal ken. Armed with spells and incantations capable of, among other things, transporting entire convoys halfway across the globe in a storm of lightning and hail, the installations were the centrepiece of many a campaign against humanity and their kanmusu slaves. As befitting their royal status, only the sheer distance between the respective Princesses kept them from each other's throats, such was the animosity shared by the siblings.
"WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A WISE IDEA TO CREATE A CANIBALISTIC SUPER-RE?!"
And like all siblings, they fought and blamed their kin for their own woes.
"DON'T YOU DARE BLAME US FOR THIS, TRUK!"
Defiant and lanky in spirit to the end, Truk Installation Princess's bobbing cyan orbs whirled and spat gaseous faux-fire at Rabaul. Short-lived and utterly inconsequential at this depth, what with the royal devoting nearly her entire spirit to maintaining her avatar, the noxious green flames invoked an outraged hiss from another sister entirely. Unlike Rabaul, Midway soothed her metaphorical feathers with a silent expulsion of water from her vicinity before she addressed the royals in a voice of crackling fires and bubbling pops.
"Were it so easy to shift blame, then I would have already flattened Truk for her idiocy." Midway paused for an outburst that never materialised. "Alas, she's innocent in this latest folly."
"How can you be so sure?" Newfoundland questioned.
"Because Truk already has a Re-class in her fleet."
Midway's shade brushed across the lamentably sparse gathering of equals, noting which of those who cringed in self-aware pity and those who lingered, defiantly witless in the face of a blindingly obvious truth. Finding far too many in the latter camp for her liking, the Warden of the Eastern Seas allowed her shade to waver as she drew upon her spirit to lay down a mystical beating left unleashed for far too long...
"Where's Singapore? A rogue she may be, but if there is any among us who can discern the twisted mind of a Re, it is she."
Several among the ground mimed spitting in disgust in the wake of Guam's abrupt declaration, their loathing for the most powerful of the Border Installations plain even at the bottom of the ocean, first among them Sevastopol. Yet just as many turned considering looks, insomuch as nigh-intangible projections could manage, toward the nondescript royal.
"Let it be known that I reject any and all contact with that smug bitch." Sevastopol declared with her characteristic bullish arrogance
Dogger Bank snorted. "Of course, you'd say that, Sev. Give it a rest already; I'm getting tired of hearing you whine and mewl every time Singapore's brought up."
"Because none of you Western princesses can be bothered to take her threat seriously! We stand on the precipice every day that we allow the Jewel of the East to straddle our two worlds!"
A soft wave of agreeing murmurs met Sevastapol's incensed outburst.
"Enough."
Midway's voice was as clear as crystal and audible to all this time.
"We can stand here debating the sanctions Singapore deserves to be levied on her... Or we can figure out what to do with the Super-Re." The Warden of the East's tone brooked no argument. "Are we in agreement at last?"
Unseen by her fellow installations, Midway's physical form leant back in her chair with a relieved groan, fingers massaging the aching base of her singular horn for some blessed relief. It wouldn't do for her neutral facade- insomuch as the Abyssals possessed such- to crack and stumble at this critical junction, after all.
"All those with Re-class aviation battleships in your fleets, raise your hands."
Nine royals, Truk included, did as requested as best as their lesser spirits could manage.
That was enough for Midway as her diamond-hard eyes flashed cyan. "How would you satiate an erratic Re with no Mistress?
"Bribed with enchanted steel!"
"Feed them Wa's of increasing value until the Re has gorged herself on their metal bones and is thus ripe for capture."
"Assault them with overwhelming force and dispose of the mad beast before it thinks to consume us all."
For their work, Midway casually met the merciless faux eyes of her more intelligent sisters before kneeling down to grab a handful of bone-white sand. The strain on her magical core increased exponentially as the sandy grains began slipping through her wavering hand, which was the Warden of the East's cue to let the sand pour between her open fingers. Far away from the sacred circle, the awed auras of her sisters drew a prideful smirk across Midway's palid features. It never failed to amuse her how easily the others were impressed by parlour tricks and shows of soul power through a shade such as this.
"All workable plans," Midway began, only to make a fist. "And utterly useless when the Re in question is 130k tons of issues, if not larger. We've all received the reports about this Super-Re's unnatural behaviour, aye?"
Hesitant nods answered her, even from those like Sevastopol, who would jump into an argument as eagerly as slaughtering humans for sport. Interestingly, the Black Sea royal extruded a soul-deep concern that was regrettably too diffuse to lock down and plunder for emotional secrets.
Perchance.
"We fell into the trap of assuming the abomination would hew to the behaviours of her class-kith, a failure attributed to no one royal in particular." Truk and Rabaul shuffled in place at that. "The Deep Drums only know how much supplies that monster consumes on a day-to-day basis. For all we know, it's been eating the Light Cruiser Low Princesses' wrecked fleet to supplement a food supply unprepared for a vessel its size."
"Then what can we do?" Guam sounded more than a little desperate. "If we can't control the beast, stuff it into a food coma or destroy it with military force, what do we have?"
Much as the idea stuck in Midway's craw, she wasn't so delusional after witnessing Re-pulse traverse the Depths-Between with nary a scratch. However, that didn't mean her physical form wasn't ready to kill any unfortunate minion to enter her office. Flexing the occult steel claws of her hands to catch the wan morning light, Midway Island Princess took a steadying breath to calm her thoughts and forced out a quartet of slimy, disgusting words.
"We entreat with Re-pulse."
Chaos erupted, but it was a chaos she was adept at weaving.
Now, if only that damned barge of a Re-class could kill Singapore in her base, then she'd be killing two sharks with one harpoon.
Whistling under her breath, Singapore shook off an errant and unexpected chill in her bones and returned to slathering thick globs of anti-fouling paint across Re-pulse's back. Mindful of the countless overlapping bruises speckled across the seemingly delicate blue scales, the Installation Princess resisted the urge to adjust her glasses and kept spreading the sludge inch by inch. She felt hundreds of judgemental eyes following her progress courtesy of Re-pulse's hidden crew, the tiny beings waiting for Singapore to slip up and take over the job to preserve their home's honour.
Personally, Singapore found the pouty little gremlins to be adorably protective of the aviation superdreadnought.
Drawing another handful from internal storage, the royal worked the paste into Re-pulse's tense shoulder. "Not to come across as an overbearing nag, dear friend, but did it ever occur to you that dodging shells would better preserve your finish?"
A muffled chuckle escaped the endless pillows of the sea naga's bust where her face resided for the duration of the maintenance session. Being face down took away far too much of Re-pulse's beauty in Singapore's mind. The mutant Re's soft cheeks, subtly mature features and expansive curves across both halves of her serpentine hull were a delight to witness from afar, let alone being allowed to apply the anti-fouling coating by hand. Up close and personal in Singapore's office, with Re-pulse stripped off her ill-fitting outfit -a garish and awfully tailored shirt provided by her crew- it was nigh-impossible to find an undamaged armour plate on the Re's back. The royal knew that asking Re-pulse to roll over to work on the front would be an impossible task if she dared ask, and it was indeed a dare.
And yet, Re-pulse's implicit and hopelessly naive trust of the harbour princess ran so deep that she accepted the offer to apply the coating the instant it was made.
The ludicrously long and oily white hair crowning the sea naga's devoted head shifted across Singapore's work as its owner raised herself just enough to clear the marshmallow embrace of her own bosom. Not even the harbour princess knew how the Re swam underwater with fuel bunkers of such prodigious size and heft other than to weakly blame it on internal magicks.
"I discovered quite swiftly that the Innies tended to break and run when they saw their naval rifles shatter on my armour," Re-pulse extolled face tanking armour piercing shells with infuriatingly buttery smooth recollection. "Say what you will about the Jerries, but that Krupp group of theirs know their business when it comes to face-hardened steel. As for the lamentable state of my finish..." Here, a curious shiver wracked Re-pulse's oiled shoulders. "Would it behove you to inquire with your quartermasters regarding these "repair buckets" I've heard so much about?"
Frowning, Singapore worked the next batch into the sea naga's scales, perhaps a tad too forcibly, given the resulting strangled grunt which reached her ears.
"Just because the cracked plates sting doesn't mean you need to find and waste a repair bucket on them, my dear." Laying a mostly clean hand on the blue skin, she rubbed careful circles with her thumb. "Trust me in this, I know when an armour plate's far beyond saving, and none of yours fit the bill." Here, a giggle slipped free and eliminated the frown. "With that said, I must profess I lack a slip suited for your..."
"Vampire needs new legs."
Was that a hint of petulance in the motherly aviation superdreadnought's voice?
"I may have a few to spare," Singapore stressed. "But why use a repair bucket to fix Vampire when we can have her and that human officer smuggled through my customs and back to their allies? Surely Vampire can wait until she gets back home?"
Her careful ministrations slowed, then halted altogether when Re-pulse refused to answer, apparently content to lie on her front in some degree of discomfort rather than give a simple response. An imp work party materialised onto the sea naga's shoulder blade with mops and buckets of anti-fouling fluid in hand, only to be chased back inside by a crab marine. Singapore watched the odd little team funnel back inside a hatch before releasing a perplexed sigh that at least elicited a response to her typical query.
"They're coming home with me."
It took the harbour princess' mind a handful of seconds to comprehend the thickset, heady blend of possessive desire and wonder colouring every one of Re-pulse's words with a honeyed glaze.
"My dear... Re-pulse, you can't just kidnap a human officer and a Kanmusu, not if you wish to be considered a neutral ally of convenience!"
"Why not?"
Roaring boilers sent pinpricks of heat up Singapore's splayed fingers until she recovered enough wits to jerk the limbs back and away from the stressed set to Re-pulse's mighty shoulders. It was easy to view the unbroken softness on the surface as the be-all-that-ends-all, yet Singapore had felt the power which lurked underneath the blubbery exterior and felt a minuscule stirring of genuine fear. Her office, once perfectly cosy with Re-pulse's multi-ton bulk filling one side, now felt awfully stifling, leading to the flustered harbour princess tugging at her shirt's tight collar as the nervous thoughts multiplied.
Glazed from head to tail in anti-fouling paint, Re-pulse's unexpected rise to her full, unadorned height would have been incredible if not for the determined set of the buxom sea naga's beautiful features.
"All of my old fleetmates and crew will find a home with me on Naval Base George. This I promise on the power of my eternal soul, with Queen Elizabeth II as my witness!"
When the urge to facepalm crossed Singapore's mind, she accepted the slap of flesh hitting flesh and fading sting with the exhausted slump of parents dealing with petulant children everywhere.
"Legally, that's still kidnapping and looked down upon by the humans."
Re-pulse folded her arms under her chest for reasons which hopefully weren't as provocative as it resulted in.
"They're mine to keep safe."
"Dear, it's kid..."
"Mine. To keep."
"Re-pulse..."
"Mine."
Oh Deep Abyss, this was going to take a while, wasn't it?
Only a short interlude to get me back into the swing of things, then the next chapter will be full length.
Till next time, my Abyssal friends.
I'll be updating this through the vagarities of my Muse, but I've also got financial reasons to try and see about getting commissioned for the shit I write. I need the money, and I'm losing nothing by trying this.
If you want to see more guaranteed Re-pulse chapters, Ko-fi link is here and the details are all there.
Music for the chapter is from Dominik Witka (Time To Level Up)
The Mariana Trench.
Abyssal stronghold, absolute depth of the ocean, and formerly a site of semi-frequent visits by Human unmanned vehicles on scientific expeditions.
Now, the Challenger Deep served as a meeting point for a cluster of murky shades arrayed in a lumpen circle, rendered uneven and disputed due to several absent members. Floating a foot above the bone-white sand if they'd possessed feet, the indistinct presences were little more than hazy outlines lit by two actinic blue spots of light in place of eyes. Calling these unfeeling pinpricks of cyan "eyes" lent them humanity and existence absent at this most hallowed of borders where the Abyss met the Ocean. A singular occult steel chain, forged of links thicker than your average I-class, rose amidst the circle's embrace to extend into the gloom whence it vanished. Some six thousand fathoms overhead, the impossibly lengthy chain terminated in an unremarkably modest floating platform used by those whose spirits lacked the critical resolve to delve into the trench and survive.
Many would loudly proclaim that the entities capable of surviving Challenger Deep were far too esoteric to regard as living beings. For the Installation Royals, linchpins of the eldritch Abyssal machine from whence the material of war flowed commanded powers far beyond mortal ken. Armed with spells and incantations capable of, among other things, transporting entire convoys halfway across the globe in a storm of lightning and hail, the installations were the centrepiece of many a campaign against humanity and their kanmusu slaves. As befitting their royal status, only the sheer distance between the respective Princesses kept them from each other's throats, such was the animosity shared by the siblings.
"WHO THOUGHT IT WAS A WISE IDEA TO CREATE A CANIBALISTIC SUPER-RE?!"
And like all siblings, they fought and blamed their kin for their own woes.
"DON'T YOU DARE BLAME US FOR THIS, TRUK!"
Defiant and lanky in spirit to the end, Truk Installation Princess's bobbing cyan orbs whirled and spat gaseous faux-fire at Rabaul. Short-lived and utterly inconsequential at this depth, what with the royal devoting nearly her entire spirit to maintaining her avatar, the noxious green flames invoked an outraged hiss from another sister entirely. Unlike Rabaul, Midway soothed her metaphorical feathers with a silent expulsion of water from her vicinity before she addressed the royals in a voice of crackling fires and bubbling pops.
"Were it so easy to shift blame, then I would have already flattened Truk for her idiocy." Midway paused for an outburst that never materialised. "Alas, she's innocent in this latest folly."
"How can you be so sure?" Newfoundland questioned.
"Because Truk already has a Re-class in her fleet."
Midway's shade brushed across the lamentably sparse gathering of equals, noting which of those who cringed in self-aware pity and those who lingered, defiantly witless in the face of a blindingly obvious truth. Finding far too many in the latter camp for her liking, the Warden of the Eastern Seas allowed her shade to waver as she drew upon her spirit to lay down a mystical beating left unleashed for far too long...
"Where's Singapore? A rogue she may be, but if there is any among us who can discern the twisted mind of a Re, it is she."
Several among the ground mimed spitting in disgust in the wake of Guam's abrupt declaration, their loathing for the most powerful of the Border Installations plain even at the bottom of the ocean, first among them Sevastopol. Yet just as many turned considering looks, insomuch as nigh-intangible projections could manage, toward the nondescript royal.
"Let it be known that I reject any and all contact with that smug bitch." Sevastopol declared with her characteristic bullish arrogance
Dogger Bank snorted. "Of course, you'd say that, Sev. Give it a rest already; I'm getting tired of hearing you whine and mewl every time Singapore's brought up."
"Because none of you Western princesses can be bothered to take her threat seriously! We stand on the precipice every day that we allow the Jewel of the East to straddle our two worlds!"
A soft wave of agreeing murmurs met Sevastapol's incensed outburst.
"Enough."
Midway's voice was as clear as crystal and audible to all this time.
"We can stand here debating the sanctions Singapore deserves to be levied on her... Or we can figure out what to do with the Super-Re." The Warden of the East's tone brooked no argument. "Are we in agreement at last?"
Unseen by her fellow installations, Midway's physical form leant back in her chair with a relieved groan, fingers massaging the aching base of her singular horn for some blessed relief. It wouldn't do for her neutral facade- insomuch as the Abyssals possessed such- to crack and stumble at this critical junction, after all.
"All those with Re-class aviation battleships in your fleets, raise your hands."
Nine royals, Truk included, did as requested as best as their lesser spirits could manage.
That was enough for Midway as her diamond-hard eyes flashed cyan. "How would you satiate an erratic Re with no Mistress?
"Bribed with enchanted steel!"
"Feed them Wa's of increasing value until the Re has gorged herself on their metal bones and is thus ripe for capture."
"Assault them with overwhelming force and dispose of the mad beast before it thinks to consume us all."
For their work, Midway casually met the merciless faux eyes of her more intelligent sisters before kneeling down to grab a handful of bone-white sand. The strain on her magical core increased exponentially as the sandy grains began slipping through her wavering hand, which was the Warden of the East's cue to let the sand pour between her open fingers. Far away from the sacred circle, the awed auras of her sisters drew a prideful smirk across Midway's palid features. It never failed to amuse her how easily the others were impressed by parlour tricks and shows of soul power through a shade such as this.
"All workable plans," Midway began, only to make a fist. "And utterly useless when the Re in question is 130k tons of issues, if not larger. We've all received the reports about this Super-Re's unnatural behaviour, aye?"
Hesitant nods answered her, even from those like Sevastopol, who would jump into an argument as eagerly as slaughtering humans for sport. Interestingly, the Black Sea royal extruded a soul-deep concern that was regrettably too diffuse to lock down and plunder for emotional secrets.
Perchance.
"We fell into the trap of assuming the abomination would hew to the behaviours of her class-kith, a failure attributed to no one royal in particular." Truk and Rabaul shuffled in place at that. "The Deep Drums only know how much supplies that monster consumes on a day-to-day basis. For all we know, it's been eating the Light Cruiser Low Princesses' wrecked fleet to supplement a food supply unprepared for a vessel its size."
"Then what can we do?" Guam sounded more than a little desperate. "If we can't control the beast, stuff it into a food coma or destroy it with military force, what do we have?"
Much as the idea stuck in Midway's craw, she wasn't so delusional after witnessing Re-pulse traverse the Depths-Between with nary a scratch. However, that didn't mean her physical form wasn't ready to kill any unfortunate minion to enter her office. Flexing the occult steel claws of her hands to catch the wan morning light, Midway Island Princess took a steadying breath to calm her thoughts and forced out a quartet of slimy, disgusting words.
"We entreat with Re-pulse."
Chaos erupted, but it was a chaos she was adept at weaving.
Now, if only that damned barge of a Re-class could kill Singapore in her base, then she'd be killing two sharks with one harpoon.
Whistling under her breath, Singapore shook off an errant and unexpected chill in her bones and returned to slathering thick globs of anti-fouling paint across Re-pulse's back. Mindful of the countless overlapping bruises speckled across the seemingly delicate blue scales, the Installation Princess resisted the urge to adjust her glasses and kept spreading the sludge inch by inch. She felt hundreds of judgemental eyes following her progress courtesy of Re-pulse's hidden crew, the tiny beings waiting for Singapore to slip up and take over the job to preserve their home's honour.
Personally, Singapore found the pouty little gremlins to be adorably protective of the aviation superdreadnought.
Drawing another handful from internal storage, the royal worked the paste into Re-pulse's tense shoulder. "Not to come across as an overbearing nag, dear friend, but did it ever occur to you that dodging shells would better preserve your finish?"
A muffled chuckle escaped the endless pillows of the sea naga's bust where her face resided for the duration of the maintenance session. Being face down took away far too much of Re-pulse's beauty in Singapore's mind. The mutant Re's soft cheeks, subtly mature features and expansive curves across both halves of her serpentine hull were a delight to witness from afar, let alone being allowed to apply the anti-fouling coating by hand. Up close and personal in Singapore's office, with Re-pulse stripped off her ill-fitting outfit -a garish and awfully tailored shirt provided by her crew- it was nigh-impossible to find an undamaged armour plate on the Re's back. The royal knew that asking Re-pulse to roll over to work on the front would be an impossible task if she dared ask, and it was indeed a dare.
And yet, Re-pulse's implicit and hopelessly naive trust of the harbour princess ran so deep that she accepted the offer to apply the coating the instant it was made.
The ludicrously long and oily white hair crowning the sea naga's devoted head shifted across Singapore's work as its owner raised herself just enough to clear the marshmallow embrace of her own bosom. Not even the harbour princess knew how the Re swam underwater with fuel bunkers of such prodigious size and heft other than to weakly blame it on internal magicks.
"I discovered quite swiftly that the Innies tended to break and run when they saw their naval rifles shatter on my armour," Re-pulse extolled face tanking armour piercing shells with infuriatingly buttery smooth recollection. "Say what you will about the Jerries, but that Krupp group of theirs know their business when it comes to face-hardened steel. As for the lamentable state of my finish..." Here, a curious shiver wracked Re-pulse's oiled shoulders. "Would it behove you to inquire with your quartermasters regarding these "repair buckets" I've heard so much about?"
Frowning, Singapore worked the next batch into the sea naga's scales, perhaps a tad too forcibly, given the resulting strangled grunt which reached her ears.
"Just because the cracked plates sting doesn't mean you need to find and waste a repair bucket on them, my dear." Laying a mostly clean hand on the blue skin, she rubbed careful circles with her thumb. "Trust me in this, I know when an armour plate's far beyond saving, and none of yours fit the bill." Here, a giggle slipped free and eliminated the frown. "With that said, I must profess I lack a slip suited for your..."
"Vampire needs new legs."
Was that a hint of petulance in the motherly aviation superdreadnought's voice?
"I may have a few to spare," Singapore stressed. "But why use a repair bucket to fix Vampire when we can have her and that human officer smuggled through my customs and back to their allies? Surely Vampire can wait until she gets back home?"
Her careful ministrations slowed, then halted altogether when Re-pulse refused to answer, apparently content to lie on her front in some degree of discomfort rather than give a simple response. An imp work party materialised onto the sea naga's shoulder blade with mops and buckets of anti-fouling fluid in hand, only to be chased back inside by a crab marine. Singapore watched the odd little team funnel back inside a hatch before releasing a perplexed sigh that at least elicited a response to her typical query.
"They're coming home with me."
It took the harbour princess' mind a handful of seconds to comprehend the thickset, heady blend of possessive desire and wonder colouring every one of Re-pulse's words with a honeyed glaze.
"My dear... Re-pulse, you can't just kidnap a human officer and a Kanmusu, not if you wish to be considered a neutral ally of convenience!"
"Why not?"
Roaring boilers sent pinpricks of heat up Singapore's splayed fingers until she recovered enough wits to jerk the limbs back and away from the stressed set to Re-pulse's mighty shoulders. It was easy to view the unbroken softness on the surface as the be-all-that-ends-all, yet Singapore had felt the power which lurked underneath the blubbery exterior and felt a minuscule stirring of genuine fear. Her office, once perfectly cosy with Re-pulse's multi-ton bulk filling one side, now felt awfully stifling, leading to the flustered harbour princess tugging at her shirt's tight collar as the nervous thoughts multiplied.
Glazed from head to tail in anti-fouling paint, Re-pulse's unexpected rise to her full, unadorned height would have been incredible if not for the determined set of the buxom sea naga's beautiful features.
"All of my old fleetmates and crew will find a home with me on Naval Base George. This I promise on the power of my eternal soul, with Queen Elizabeth II as my witness!"
When the urge to facepalm crossed Singapore's mind, she accepted the slap of flesh hitting flesh and fading sting with the exhausted slump of parents dealing with petulant children everywhere.
"Legally, that's still kidnapping and looked down upon by the humans."
Re-pulse folded her arms under her chest for reasons which hopefully weren't as provocative as it resulted in.
"They're mine to keep safe."
"Dear, it's kid..."
"Mine. To keep."
"Re-pulse..."
"Mine."
Oh Deep Abyss, this was going to take a while, wasn't it?
Only a short interlude to get me back into the swing of things, then the next chapter will be full length.
Till next time, my Abyssal friends.
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Can't see the images, they're not loading to me.
Ooh La Wa (Canon Omake)
HarakoniWarhawk
Striking from the Skies
- Location
- Holy Terra
- Pronouns
- She/Her
This is a little something I needed to expel from my mind before I get started on the next true chapter. It's got enough links to the main story that I figured I can keep it as a canon omake.
Music for the chapter is from Slash (30 Years To Life)
"You continue to perform... adequately, Wa."
Stoic in the face of that bilge-churning voice, I poured every fibre of my eldritch being into embodying my class's docile passivity. I'd have failed months ago if I'd possessed a recognisable face, but the toothed headpiece quite literally bolted over what remained of my head eliminated those facial tells. And in that vein, my pallid, weak arms were too securely shackled to so much as twitch, let alone fidget enough to expose my inner thoughts. The sole hint that I wasn't a mentally crippled icon of my class was the furtive twitches of my leg stumps hidden deep within the bloated, overloaded ball of abyssal steel, biomechanical interfaces and machinery constituting the bulk of a Wa-class transport.
Sensing a shift in the damp sea air, I cringed as one of my Mistress' clawed gauntlets traced a stinging furrow across the lumpen pudge of my humanoid upper half's midriff. While no great beauty by Abyssal standards, let alone Human or Kanmusu, I still lamented the damage within the privacy of my caged mind. But like every obedient Wa bound to a Princess, I couldn't react as my owner and captor briefly pressed her talons into the buckling hull plating holding together through the rivet's valiant efforts. Horrifically aware that a few more pounds of pressure would puncture the already leaking fuel bunkers located there, I let slip a pitiful low of distress to feed the bitch's sadistic needs. East Timor giggled and pulled back as I blindly looked toward the biting lines left in my thin hull, apparently blessedly content with leaving a mark that wouldn't require repairs.
This time.
Sometimes, being functionally blind saved my fat aft, and today was no different. East Timor's spiritual presence briefly overpowered me like a leaden blanket covered in hooks before she grew bored of my domesticated existence. Her bestial lower half growled and huffed, expelling stinking, sulphuric air across my deck, and then the Princess walked off without another word. I remained floating at the dockside for half an hour longer in terrified silence that this was the day my rusted hull was pulled into the breaker forge until a sliver of common sense won out. A sailor retrieved the signal flags from their locker and risked annihilation by sticking their head outside the hatch.
When East Timor's spiritual presence didn't immediately pop the nervous gremlin like a well-fed tick, they sprinted across my deck to the bow and began signalling for a tug.
I, meanwhile, turned my attention inward to the dilapidated corridors of my hull. Gremlins in threadbare, unmarked uniforms emerged from hiding to return to their posts with nervous speed. No sailor managed to move more than a few steps before stepping over puddles of water, keeping weight off creaking steps or ducking under exposed wires and rusting pipes leaking congealing fluids. No better was the decrepit state of my hull embodied than the oppressive gloom of my engineering spaces where stripped-down engineers struggled to bring my ancient diesels to life. As always, my breathing came in shallow and rapid cycles as the 9-cylinder engines were laboriously coaxed to rattling life one after the other. I squirmed helplessly in the inescapable grip of my grotesque hull with the first crackling surges of my revitalised electrical grid, praying to anything that might be listening that an errant spark wouldn't ignite a fire onboard.
A thought went to the crew mopping up crude oil leaking into the hallways surrounding the fuel bunker mounted amidships. If the seas were anyway rougher than the light chop present in the harbour, the poor bastards would be soaked in the crude by the time I arrived at my destination. Feeling they deserved something for their endless task, I gathered the pathetic wisps of my mystical abilities before forming them into an admittedly pathetic pulse of encouragement. The already crippling pressure of my mental shackles threatened to cook my mind as punishment for going above my station, yet seeing the gremlins pausing to cheer and wave at my immaterial presence brought an exhausted smile to my hidden face.
If there was ever one good reason to continue on with the perpetual nigh-crippling pain of dilapidated machinery, keel-breaking freight loads, and overfilled fuel bunkers, it was seeing my crew happy.
Such was the life of a Wa.
"Lookin about to explode at the rivets there, you overgrown barge." I turned my toothed helm toward the owner of the raspy feminine voice. "Ri-884 ate half the Imp tugs, so you've got me today."
Joy entered my straining diesel heart for the first time in far too long. "Tee-Suu!"
In lieu of replying, Tsu-101 sailed around to my aft and planted her massive artificial gauntlets against the rounded dome of my lower body. Between her turbines and my thundering diesels, I began moving under something approaching my own power with a light shift to port so as to face the harbour mouth. The closest thing to a friend I possessed in my second life as a Wa contented herself with pushing my 22k ton aft into one of the shipping channels before shifting to linger at my starboard side. I didn't need the unsubtle spiritual brushes from -101 to know she was throwing my overloaded hull a concerned look or six and the trio of gouges slowly weeping black ichor across my bloated midriff.
Moving at a blistering 8 knots, she'd have plenty of time to voice her...
"One of these days, you're going to push the bitch too far," unlike her general radio transmission, this came through the walky-talky on my Captain's belt.
"Still not dead, Tee-Suu," I gently reminded the silly worrywort. "Much as East Timor enjoys playing with her freighters, she knows her chances of getting another elite Wa are absolute zero."
Wishing to be recalled as more than a bolted-on afterthought, my gun crews -the hallmark of my existence as a Wa above the rest- poured into their positions. Japanese 100mm naval rifles, Russian 3-inch HA AA, and British 2-pounder QF guns constituted the main bulk of my defensive firepower. No two emplacements and turrets possessed the exact specifications, let alone markings, a fact I suspected led on from the abject oddity of my creation. Nevertheless, the gremlins in control ran through their drills with plenty of training experience and absolutely nothing combat-related. Not for the lack of determination on the little midget's horrifically deformed faces; no, my crew were far too brave for their size.
Rather, it was simply because my getting hit by enemy fire would guarantee a short and agonising demise as my crippled hull fell apart at the seams.
Lost in my ruminations, we passed the fortress guns defending the harbour mouth with nary a prod from the immobile sentient fortifications. And while I knew the route better than the literal port I resided within, if not by choice, Tee-Suu's presence at my side kept drifting to a bare minimum. Sometimes, I wondered to myself what East Timor's domain looked like with my own eyes rather than the fish-eyed remote vision I received from my Captain. Whatever Manatuto might have once been before the Abyssal War erupted, now I sailed west along a mile of cratered and burnt-out coastline. In her morose moments, -101 described the coastline as a thin grove of blackened fingers grasping for the perpetually stormy sky, shrinking year on year as the docks expanded in fits and starts whenever East Timor received a glut of raiding supplies.
Grasped by the urge to wrap my arms around myself, I instead rocked every so slightly from port to starboard, hiding my distress through the natural movement of a fully laden freighter. Here within sight of the queen bitch's most fervently loyal subordinates, showing any further weakness than that expected of a hapless Wa was a threat I couldn't risk. For that, I had Tsu-101 to thank for having any time to myself instead of being shoved into and out of convoys the instant my cargo was offloaded.
Ah, almost forgot. "Where am I headed this time?"
The big bad Tsu choked and spent an adorable few seconds hacking and coughing to hide that she'd forgotten to tell me our destination. I couldn't see the humanoid Abyssal light cruiser fumbling, but the general impression from the lookouts and gunnery crews was one of clumsy hilarity as -101's massive gauntlets pulled her windmilling arms away from her hull.
"We're, um, well... eep!" Apparently, Tsu very nearly capsized there. "If Big Wama there can keep straight and level, Helm, then so can we! Destination, destination... Surabaya!"
With a quick refresher from the navigation charts that I very much wasn't meant to have stored under a false bottom of a foot locker, I calculated the likely course and narrowed my residual eyes. The withered sight organs barely shifted after half a decade of enforced blindness and were, somewhat darkly, likely to be consumed by my eldritch body before the decade was out.
With that cheerful thought in mind, I offered a noncommital hum. "That explains all the runs East Timor's forced me into; Java's squeezing her vassals."
Even expecting the reaction, I still turned my toothed helm toward Tsu-See when she offered a falsetto giggle in reply. Everyone in their right mind should be terrified of the Battleship Hime, like my friend was, and not only because Java was the heavyweight in the Southern East Indies. As for me? The pained furrow of my invisible brow deepened from the moderate swell impacting my stressed hull rather than the non-existent fear I felt when speaking about Java Hime. But if there was one thing -101 loathed more than discussing royalty, it was silence.
Sometimes, it was a blessing and a curse to be so nihilistic.
"You didn't hear this from me, understand?"
Intrigued, I canted my oppressive helmet. "Rumours?"
There came the distinctive squeal of occult steel rubbing together as my fleetmate and fellow cripple rubbed her fingers together. Lacking eyebrows to make the gesture, I dropped to ten knots so as to entirely turn my head toward Tsu-See without risking drifting off course.
"I've heard a few things from the vessels on long-range patrols out west," Tsu-101 admitted slowly, every word emerging like molasses. "Nothing ironclad, you get me? Ri-007 got into a fight with one of Java's bodyguards, and her crew stole a few logbooks as payment for not ripping their keel out under them."
Together, we paused for a much-needed shudder at the casual, sadistic mannerisms of the Forge-born heavy cruisers. But then, Ri-884 eating most of the tug imps let me spend this time with Tsu-See, so the heavier warship's casual brutality sometimes paid helpful dividends.
"A Kanmusu sub can't ram a torpedo up that cunt's propeller shafts soon enough," -101 grumbled before getting back on course. "-007 arrived back at port and began drinking that illicit human swill while ranting about East Timor not breaking free from Java now that they were 'running scared from shadows'."
I expended a measure of my spiritual reserves to prod my meandering friend onward. "Then what?"
"Eh?"
"What's Java running scared from, Tsu-See?"
"A Re-Hime to the north-west."
My diesels hitched in sympathetic terror with my heart as it skipped a beat upon hearing a phrase that not even the most depraved of the Abyss' servants dared conceive of. The breathlessness lasted barely a handful of seconds, and yet that was enough to leave me light-headed and blundering into, rather than around, a small wave. A stretch of hull along my port side squealed as tons of choppy sea water impacted it flat on, resulting in a handful of popped rivets ricocheting around the cargo bay on the far side. I cringed as the crunch of breaking wood rang out from a stack of salted fish, freighter instincts lambasting me until stunned disbelief ran roughshod over the Wa thoughts.
"A..."
A forked tongue brushed across bloodless lips lacking flesh as long-dormant behaviours surged to the fore before the overpowering crush of the mental cage forced them back into the depths of my broken mind.
It hurt to breathe.
"A Re-Hime? Are you sure?"
Before my friend answered, I knew that I'd need to warn the others before it was too late.
Every Wa, no matter their origin, knew that we were one of a Re's favourite snacks because we were helpless loot pinatas ripe for the harvesting. With the "regular" Re able to consume an entire small convoy in one sitting, how many of my fellow intelligent sisters would be eaten if a Re Princess felt hungry?!
Millions of tons of screaming Wa would sink to sate that impossibly voracious appetite.
This Wa ain't a normal Wa, but I'll leave it up to y'all to figure out how exactly she differs.
Plus, we need more Wa-centric stories. Might flesh out that SI idea elsewhere to really hammer in how fucked up a Wa would be.
With that said, this doesn't count toward the two guaranteed chapters. I'll reserve those for true chapters.
Music for the chapter is from Slash (30 Years To Life)
"You continue to perform... adequately, Wa."
Stoic in the face of that bilge-churning voice, I poured every fibre of my eldritch being into embodying my class's docile passivity. I'd have failed months ago if I'd possessed a recognisable face, but the toothed headpiece quite literally bolted over what remained of my head eliminated those facial tells. And in that vein, my pallid, weak arms were too securely shackled to so much as twitch, let alone fidget enough to expose my inner thoughts. The sole hint that I wasn't a mentally crippled icon of my class was the furtive twitches of my leg stumps hidden deep within the bloated, overloaded ball of abyssal steel, biomechanical interfaces and machinery constituting the bulk of a Wa-class transport.
Sensing a shift in the damp sea air, I cringed as one of my Mistress' clawed gauntlets traced a stinging furrow across the lumpen pudge of my humanoid upper half's midriff. While no great beauty by Abyssal standards, let alone Human or Kanmusu, I still lamented the damage within the privacy of my caged mind. But like every obedient Wa bound to a Princess, I couldn't react as my owner and captor briefly pressed her talons into the buckling hull plating holding together through the rivet's valiant efforts. Horrifically aware that a few more pounds of pressure would puncture the already leaking fuel bunkers located there, I let slip a pitiful low of distress to feed the bitch's sadistic needs. East Timor giggled and pulled back as I blindly looked toward the biting lines left in my thin hull, apparently blessedly content with leaving a mark that wouldn't require repairs.
This time.
Sometimes, being functionally blind saved my fat aft, and today was no different. East Timor's spiritual presence briefly overpowered me like a leaden blanket covered in hooks before she grew bored of my domesticated existence. Her bestial lower half growled and huffed, expelling stinking, sulphuric air across my deck, and then the Princess walked off without another word. I remained floating at the dockside for half an hour longer in terrified silence that this was the day my rusted hull was pulled into the breaker forge until a sliver of common sense won out. A sailor retrieved the signal flags from their locker and risked annihilation by sticking their head outside the hatch.
When East Timor's spiritual presence didn't immediately pop the nervous gremlin like a well-fed tick, they sprinted across my deck to the bow and began signalling for a tug.
I, meanwhile, turned my attention inward to the dilapidated corridors of my hull. Gremlins in threadbare, unmarked uniforms emerged from hiding to return to their posts with nervous speed. No sailor managed to move more than a few steps before stepping over puddles of water, keeping weight off creaking steps or ducking under exposed wires and rusting pipes leaking congealing fluids. No better was the decrepit state of my hull embodied than the oppressive gloom of my engineering spaces where stripped-down engineers struggled to bring my ancient diesels to life. As always, my breathing came in shallow and rapid cycles as the 9-cylinder engines were laboriously coaxed to rattling life one after the other. I squirmed helplessly in the inescapable grip of my grotesque hull with the first crackling surges of my revitalised electrical grid, praying to anything that might be listening that an errant spark wouldn't ignite a fire onboard.
A thought went to the crew mopping up crude oil leaking into the hallways surrounding the fuel bunker mounted amidships. If the seas were anyway rougher than the light chop present in the harbour, the poor bastards would be soaked in the crude by the time I arrived at my destination. Feeling they deserved something for their endless task, I gathered the pathetic wisps of my mystical abilities before forming them into an admittedly pathetic pulse of encouragement. The already crippling pressure of my mental shackles threatened to cook my mind as punishment for going above my station, yet seeing the gremlins pausing to cheer and wave at my immaterial presence brought an exhausted smile to my hidden face.
If there was ever one good reason to continue on with the perpetual nigh-crippling pain of dilapidated machinery, keel-breaking freight loads, and overfilled fuel bunkers, it was seeing my crew happy.
Such was the life of a Wa.
"Lookin about to explode at the rivets there, you overgrown barge." I turned my toothed helm toward the owner of the raspy feminine voice. "Ri-884 ate half the Imp tugs, so you've got me today."
Joy entered my straining diesel heart for the first time in far too long. "Tee-Suu!"
In lieu of replying, Tsu-101 sailed around to my aft and planted her massive artificial gauntlets against the rounded dome of my lower body. Between her turbines and my thundering diesels, I began moving under something approaching my own power with a light shift to port so as to face the harbour mouth. The closest thing to a friend I possessed in my second life as a Wa contented herself with pushing my 22k ton aft into one of the shipping channels before shifting to linger at my starboard side. I didn't need the unsubtle spiritual brushes from -101 to know she was throwing my overloaded hull a concerned look or six and the trio of gouges slowly weeping black ichor across my bloated midriff.
Moving at a blistering 8 knots, she'd have plenty of time to voice her...
"One of these days, you're going to push the bitch too far," unlike her general radio transmission, this came through the walky-talky on my Captain's belt.
"Still not dead, Tee-Suu," I gently reminded the silly worrywort. "Much as East Timor enjoys playing with her freighters, she knows her chances of getting another elite Wa are absolute zero."
Wishing to be recalled as more than a bolted-on afterthought, my gun crews -the hallmark of my existence as a Wa above the rest- poured into their positions. Japanese 100mm naval rifles, Russian 3-inch HA AA, and British 2-pounder QF guns constituted the main bulk of my defensive firepower. No two emplacements and turrets possessed the exact specifications, let alone markings, a fact I suspected led on from the abject oddity of my creation. Nevertheless, the gremlins in control ran through their drills with plenty of training experience and absolutely nothing combat-related. Not for the lack of determination on the little midget's horrifically deformed faces; no, my crew were far too brave for their size.
Rather, it was simply because my getting hit by enemy fire would guarantee a short and agonising demise as my crippled hull fell apart at the seams.
Lost in my ruminations, we passed the fortress guns defending the harbour mouth with nary a prod from the immobile sentient fortifications. And while I knew the route better than the literal port I resided within, if not by choice, Tee-Suu's presence at my side kept drifting to a bare minimum. Sometimes, I wondered to myself what East Timor's domain looked like with my own eyes rather than the fish-eyed remote vision I received from my Captain. Whatever Manatuto might have once been before the Abyssal War erupted, now I sailed west along a mile of cratered and burnt-out coastline. In her morose moments, -101 described the coastline as a thin grove of blackened fingers grasping for the perpetually stormy sky, shrinking year on year as the docks expanded in fits and starts whenever East Timor received a glut of raiding supplies.
Grasped by the urge to wrap my arms around myself, I instead rocked every so slightly from port to starboard, hiding my distress through the natural movement of a fully laden freighter. Here within sight of the queen bitch's most fervently loyal subordinates, showing any further weakness than that expected of a hapless Wa was a threat I couldn't risk. For that, I had Tsu-101 to thank for having any time to myself instead of being shoved into and out of convoys the instant my cargo was offloaded.
Ah, almost forgot. "Where am I headed this time?"
The big bad Tsu choked and spent an adorable few seconds hacking and coughing to hide that she'd forgotten to tell me our destination. I couldn't see the humanoid Abyssal light cruiser fumbling, but the general impression from the lookouts and gunnery crews was one of clumsy hilarity as -101's massive gauntlets pulled her windmilling arms away from her hull.
"We're, um, well... eep!" Apparently, Tsu very nearly capsized there. "If Big Wama there can keep straight and level, Helm, then so can we! Destination, destination... Surabaya!"
With a quick refresher from the navigation charts that I very much wasn't meant to have stored under a false bottom of a foot locker, I calculated the likely course and narrowed my residual eyes. The withered sight organs barely shifted after half a decade of enforced blindness and were, somewhat darkly, likely to be consumed by my eldritch body before the decade was out.
With that cheerful thought in mind, I offered a noncommital hum. "That explains all the runs East Timor's forced me into; Java's squeezing her vassals."
Even expecting the reaction, I still turned my toothed helm toward Tsu-See when she offered a falsetto giggle in reply. Everyone in their right mind should be terrified of the Battleship Hime, like my friend was, and not only because Java was the heavyweight in the Southern East Indies. As for me? The pained furrow of my invisible brow deepened from the moderate swell impacting my stressed hull rather than the non-existent fear I felt when speaking about Java Hime. But if there was one thing -101 loathed more than discussing royalty, it was silence.
Sometimes, it was a blessing and a curse to be so nihilistic.
"You didn't hear this from me, understand?"
Intrigued, I canted my oppressive helmet. "Rumours?"
There came the distinctive squeal of occult steel rubbing together as my fleetmate and fellow cripple rubbed her fingers together. Lacking eyebrows to make the gesture, I dropped to ten knots so as to entirely turn my head toward Tsu-See without risking drifting off course.
"I've heard a few things from the vessels on long-range patrols out west," Tsu-101 admitted slowly, every word emerging like molasses. "Nothing ironclad, you get me? Ri-007 got into a fight with one of Java's bodyguards, and her crew stole a few logbooks as payment for not ripping their keel out under them."
Together, we paused for a much-needed shudder at the casual, sadistic mannerisms of the Forge-born heavy cruisers. But then, Ri-884 eating most of the tug imps let me spend this time with Tsu-See, so the heavier warship's casual brutality sometimes paid helpful dividends.
"A Kanmusu sub can't ram a torpedo up that cunt's propeller shafts soon enough," -101 grumbled before getting back on course. "-007 arrived back at port and began drinking that illicit human swill while ranting about East Timor not breaking free from Java now that they were 'running scared from shadows'."
I expended a measure of my spiritual reserves to prod my meandering friend onward. "Then what?"
"Eh?"
"What's Java running scared from, Tsu-See?"
"A Re-Hime to the north-west."
My diesels hitched in sympathetic terror with my heart as it skipped a beat upon hearing a phrase that not even the most depraved of the Abyss' servants dared conceive of. The breathlessness lasted barely a handful of seconds, and yet that was enough to leave me light-headed and blundering into, rather than around, a small wave. A stretch of hull along my port side squealed as tons of choppy sea water impacted it flat on, resulting in a handful of popped rivets ricocheting around the cargo bay on the far side. I cringed as the crunch of breaking wood rang out from a stack of salted fish, freighter instincts lambasting me until stunned disbelief ran roughshod over the Wa thoughts.
"A..."
A forked tongue brushed across bloodless lips lacking flesh as long-dormant behaviours surged to the fore before the overpowering crush of the mental cage forced them back into the depths of my broken mind.
It hurt to breathe.
"A Re-Hime? Are you sure?"
Before my friend answered, I knew that I'd need to warn the others before it was too late.
Every Wa, no matter their origin, knew that we were one of a Re's favourite snacks because we were helpless loot pinatas ripe for the harvesting. With the "regular" Re able to consume an entire small convoy in one sitting, how many of my fellow intelligent sisters would be eaten if a Re Princess felt hungry?!
Millions of tons of screaming Wa would sink to sate that impossibly voracious appetite.
This Wa ain't a normal Wa, but I'll leave it up to y'all to figure out how exactly she differs.
Plus, we need more Wa-centric stories. Might flesh out that SI idea elsewhere to really hammer in how fucked up a Wa would be.
With that said, this doesn't count toward the two guaranteed chapters. I'll reserve those for true chapters.
@HarakoniWarhawk the image in chapter one is broken
HarakoniWarhawk
Striking from the Skies
- Location
- Holy Terra
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Dammit, I'll need to try and find the one I used for that. Thanks for catching it.
Chapter Thirteen
HarakoniWarhawk
Striking from the Skies
- Location
- Holy Terra
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Many apologies about the delay, life and world of warships intruded.
The first of two chapters commissioned by Darik through my Kofi here.
Music for the chapter is from Powerwolf (Joan of Arc)
In an officer and gentleman's service to the Crown, there were times when the lamentably necessary act of skullduggery became part and parcel of their duties. Some categorically rejected the call, insisting on standing above the grim necessity while becoming entangled in the political morass regardless. The higher one climbed the ranks, the more wide-reaching and potentially tumultuous the skullduggery became, as did the requirement for ever greater secrecy. For a relevant example, it'd be the height of poor form for a Captain in Her Majesty's service to undermine the public impression of their confidence in an ally.
Hence why Repulse's XO found himself treating with oriental smugglers in an opium den on the outskirts of Singapore -the city, not the Installation Royal- with a select few men.
The XO's decision was informed by the ramshackle construction of salvaged bricks, tin sheets, and steel, visibly marked by intense heat, as the den's rear entrance backed out onto the channel between the island and the mainland. A small jetty used for smuggling product across the water and down the coast now served as a temporary home to an unmarked motor launch guarded by two of Repulse's marines. Fortuitous in hindsight, as the Commander's "hosts" snuck regular glances at the doorway leading to the jetty as if afeared that the marines would storm in, guns blazing. Somewhat laughable, given the six armed thugs pretending to lounge on ratty sofas were armed with a hefty selection of modern firearms split between assault rifles and automatic pistols. Perchance, the threadbare rugs and cheap bead curtains separating each consumption booth were less of a grimy affection than the Commander initially assumed.
Of course, both of the marine guards, as did the XO, discreetly assumed the appearance of the men they used to be before their ship sank and took them to the bottom.
It wouldn't do to terrify the smugglers overmuch, after all, if they were to secure the oriental's underhanded services.
Just a tad.
Rolling the empty opium smoker between his fingers, the XO let slip a minuscule fragment of his other self and looked up with the dead, pupilless eyes of a fish. Set in an otherwise hawkish man's face, the lead smuggler subtly jerked and paled, the Commander pretending that the other man's hand hadn't darted to the heavy pistol at his hip. A blink later, the officer's eyes were a normal, piercing green that conveyed a weight of patriarchal disappointment, which only one such as Repulse's executive officer could portray without condescension.
"Fifty thousand pounds per man to ship them to Ceylon," unhurried, the XO tugged at the cuff of his tropical white shirt. "You want half a million sterling in the modern coinage for a simple hop to Ceylon, not even the subcontinent proper."
To the smuggler's credit, he was savvy when money was on the line.
All subtle fear melted away as the ringleader took a long pull from his opium pipe and raised his free hand with outstretched digits. "I am already cutting my margins dangerously tight for that low price, Honoured Spirit."
"One: Singapore's patrols are deep and intensive, far beyond even the old republic's judiciary and twice as ruthless in the face of illegal behaviours."
Closing his eyes for a heartbeat, the XO's mental gaze tracked a sodden presence meandering up the path from the channel bank.
"Two: You yourself admit that detection means failure and shame, enough to command a premium for discretion."
Struggling under the weight of an unseen load, the visitor escaped the cloying mud and paused to converse with the marine guards before forging ahead,
"Three... Ship Spirits patrol the Indian Ocean, and especially Malaysia's coastline. Unless your chosen men can adequately disguise their unique nature from the spirit's all-seeing senses, I must contend with my organisation being labelled Hostis humani generis for helping you."
The left side of the XO's lips minutely twitched when the presence made sure to kick the muck off their boots outside the door before loudly clearing their throat.
"Ah've got a delivery for a Mister Officer, first name Executive!"
Unfolding himself from the sofa with nary a hint of motion, the XO practically glid through the panicking orientals to open the door and favour the soaking sailor on the other side with a raised eyebrow.
"You're late, Baxter."
"Ah got entangled with some queer-lookin fish people from the far bank, Sah," was the burdened Baxter's response as he hefted the massive wooden crate in his arms. "Still got her on time, didn't ah?"
Offering a noncommital hum, Repulse's executive officer cocked an ear to the angry Mandarin shouts at his back while giving the crate a once over. Still intact despite the submersible trek and the thick pitch sealing the lid from the water looked intact to his questing gaze. Content that the valuable contents hadn't been damaged in transit, the XO silently extended his hands and accepted the several hundred kilos of crate without a sound.
"Remind me to mark you down for impudence, Midshipman," he dismissed the grinning sailor.
Mindful of the doorway's width, the hawkish officer carefully returned inside the opium den with the crate in hand and peered over the lid to find himself gazing down the shaking barrels of several firearms. With tension thick enough to blunt even Repulse's bow, the XO briefly ruminated on the best course of action before cutting straight to the point.
To the ringleader, he aimed his mild ire in lightly-accented Cantonese. "Do put those away. Experienced men such as yourselves should well know that modern weapons barely affect spirits like I."
A delightfully blatant shock rippled through the hardened thugs before they lowered their weapons at a barked command from their leader. Sloppy, the XO privately labelled the dreadful showing yet let nothing slip as he moved to drop the crate with a resounding bang. Feeling every eye in the place on him, the officer produced a short hammer and chisel from the depths of his sleeves and began breaking the pitch seal. He was nearly three-quarters of the way through the process when the ringleader started hovering over his shoulder.
"Your Cantonese is impressive for an Englishman."
Lining up the chisel, the XO swung the hammer with a curt bark of laughter. "Hard not to pick up the language when you were born here." A crack split the air and truncated any further conversation. "Perfect. Grab that other side there and lift."
With the ringleader's perturbed aid, they raised the lid and exposed the neatly packed rows of Sterling submachine guns gleaming from the packing oil they'd been stored in. Lamenting the necessity, a grimacing XO selected one firearm from among the batch and pulled it out to show the blank-faced smuggler leader.
"Sterlings, fresh from Naval Base George's armouries," he swapped back to English to throw the ruffian's mind off track. "One hundred guns per crate, with four spare magazines and a thousand rounds of ammunition included for free. Four more crates are in the channel; that's five hundred sterlings if you accept my adjusted deal in lieu of your proposed exorbitant prices."
Despite a valiant dismissive sniff and side-eye glare, the sharp-eyed oriental's hands lingered in the sticky pitch, refusing to release a substantial wealth in firearms now that he had them on hand.
"There are old weapons in design, if not manufacture," the leader slowly laid out, piece by steady piece. "If I wanted such, there are many areas on the mainland where more effective weapons can be found for free if one knows where to look." And yet, he couldn't tear his gaze from the sterling in the XO's grip. "Your kind were more than thorough when they tore Malaysia apart in search of blood to spill for their dark gods..."
"Let me be frank, as neither of us has time to burn this close to Singapore; your stocks of weapons old enough to harm the beasts that now reside upon the ruins of Malaysia's cities are inadequate."
Returning the submachine gun to the crate, Repulse's XO favoured the Communist guerilla -for that was who the man was, beyond a smuggler- with a predatory half-grin.
"I dare say we hate the Abyssals as much as yourself, if not more," the suspicious leader looked unconvinced, prompting a change of tack. "A fellow enemy of a common foe, then. Nothing more, nothing less. You get our men to Ceylon, and there'll be far more than mere sterlings in your hands come the spring."
For the first time, the oriental in command of this band of ruffians cast a distrustful glance at his fellows, all of whom, the XO suspected, knew no English to eavesdrop. Whatever thoughts were going through the guerilla's head, cold pragmatism won out against his ideological opposition to working with a British officer.
Even if that officer was a resurrected fragment of a man who'd drowned at sea over eighty years before.
"Ten men to Sri Lanka, then?"
"Sri Lanka, Ceylon, whatever you wish to call it, aye. Get them there without discovery, and you'll have your support."
With one last look at the crate of freshly manufactured sterlings, the smuggler nodded and offered a hand for Repulse's executive officer to shake once.
"A new war creates strange bedfellows, no?"
In that, the XO could wholeheartedly agree.
An aviation superdreadnought of the Royal Navy cannot be denied in war or peace.
"Repulse, my Dear, I cannot accept payment for tending to your most superficial of injuries," Singapore oh so stridently waged her verbal war with apt fervour. "I'd be remiss to demand recompense when you still have cracked spars!"
I was shaking my head with a fond smile long before the Installation Princess finished her impassioned declaration. Not, I hoped, in a manner that came across as smug; heavens forbid I become that uncouth with an old friend. In this, the constant movement of my hands in grabbing shrunk-down crated aircraft from my holds before depositing the full-size article on the pier undoubtedly helped soften the blow.
Humming a little ditty, I laid another Wyvern alongside the seventeen already resting in the midmorning sun for collection whenever Singapore rediscovered the usage of her cranes. As numbers three through sixteen had prompted no reaction, I suspected my slack-jawed ally felt somewhat overwhelmed with the bounty.
"Nonsense! If there is one thing I have an unreasonable glut of, it's aircraft and helicopters. Besides," I pointedly ignored the CAG's bitching in the back of his wardroom. "You need not retain the Wyverns for your airfield's use."
Singapore froze and cocked her head like some manner of adorable canine. "Are you implying what I think you are..."
A living typhoon of malformed Innie dockworkers boiled out of their boltholes and hidden residences to swarm over the crated strike aircraft and the logistical equipment necessary to unload and examine them. Standing amidst the boiling ink-black swarm, Singapore was an immobile statue of noble bearing and serenity as tiny bodies flowed around her low heels. A crate had been professionally opened and laid out in mere moments with a brief clamour of hammering and squeaking grunts. Once exposed, the constituent parts of a Westland Wyvern were examined with single-minded efficiency by the swarm before the roiling living wave all but absorbed the unbuilt strike craft.
"Truly a terrifying sight to behold," Captain Tennant mused from the safety of the weather bridge. "A sight that feels unnatural on such a lovely day as this."
I had eyes only for Singapore. "Be that as it may be, Captain, we can't deny that Singapore commands an industrious crew, which the men at Naval Base George would do well to imitate."
And that wasn't a lamenting of my fleet's construction personnel, either; far from it. Instead, it naturally percolated to the surface of my mind as I witnessed the throbbing and shifting blob of busy little gremlins spend several minutes covering the Wyvern. My crew naturally ceased unloading the remaining payment aircraft and hung out at the edge of the flight deck, dozens of curious sailors and airmen taking a break to watch Singapore at work. Separate from the visible was that intangible realm from when the Drums in the Deep originated, whose siren song filled my ears yet never deigned to grace my finned ears. I stared at the buried Wyvern and saw nought, for my mind was elsewhere, buoyed aloft by the symphony of Singapore's soul.
Were there a musician, living or dead, claimed to be the pinnacle of their art, I would be the first to decry them as a charlatan.
My own heart of hearts, patchwork as it was, rose alongside the shrill cry of port locomotives, reverberated to the rhythm of riveters at work and sang in chorus with the victorious rush of a ship racing down the slipway. All the industrial power of a port and shipyard condensed and filtered through the will of a single embodied woman whom I owed more than I might ever repay in a dozen lifetimes. Tugging a rag from the cavernous depths of my bosom, I dabbed freely at the salty droplets crowding in the corners of my eyes lest my view of Singapore be rendered incomprehensible. In the bespectacled avatar's soul song, I bore reverent witness to powers beyond mortal ken turned toward building, repairing and bringing new life into a world that daredn't deserve their innocent presence. An old ally turned new friend was Singapore, and I was proud to continue drying my leaking eyes until the industrious swarm of miniature gremlins receded and exposed a complete Wyvern on the damp concrete.
Around me lay a ring twenty metres across, shining cleanly in the sun from the invisible deluge I'd inadvertently caused. Flustered, I attempted curling my tail around myself in contrition, only for a frighteningly intense Singapore to appear far within my personal space. One painful sting on the nose later, I was staring down the length of my compatriot's extended trigger finger at the sharp eyes behind it.
"What do you call this?" The manicured digit swung around with an echo of a dock crane to land on the Wyvern.
My ears twitched and flushed a deep indigo. "A Westland Wyvern?"
"No!...Well, yes, but no!"
Sharing a mental shrug with Captain Tennant, I watched Singapore furiously stomp over to the big-boned strike fighter with no clear idea of her intent, only that the soul song was never far from my ears. She prowled around the aircraft in what might have been intense silence if not for the outright grumbling pouring from the Installation's pursed lips every time she paused to examine a specific part. I wisely kept my trap shut in the vain hope that the fey mood that'd overtaken my companion was a short-lived beast, yet it was not to be so.
Out of the blue, Singapore leaned across the left wing to glare at me. "Where's the Abyssal essence, Repulse? My workers reviewed every nut, bolt and link on this, and I thought the crews were insane when they proved unable to spiritually compress the craft."
'Spiritually compress'...?
"But no, you really did leave seven thousand pounds of supernaturally inert aircraft on my pier, as if I hadn't seen your crew unload it from your rigging in front of my eyes!" I cringed as phantom cutting torches hissed beside my head. "Do you know what you've done... No, of course, you don't; why would you? I'd be better off pretending this hasn't broken every conceivable law of the Deep Magicks."
Somewhat shyly, I raised a hand. "Pardon me, Singapore,"
Much like a punctured tyre, the Harbour Princess' unnatural fervour vanished into the muggy heat of a Malaysian sunny day without a sea breeze. Left behind was an altogether lesser woman in stature and soul, at least until the industrial symphony swelled and colour returned to Singapore's cheeks. Caught in profile by an errant sunbeam, I marvelled at the noble beauty's unbowed, straight and perfect posture despite her invisible ailment.
"Repulse," a flicked hand brought a crane boom swinging to hover over the crated aircraft. "Once again, you've managed to take an ironclad rule of my existence- that being Kanmusu and Abyssal aircraft are inherently magical entities- and produced an aircraft indistinguishable from a Human-made craft."
Having retreated to the privacy of my battle bridge, Captain Tennant tugged at a non-existent beard with his clawed gauntlets. While the resulting screeching of metal on metal had several of the bridge crew covering their ears, none dared interrupt their CO's contemplative moment.
And nor did I, for I was if nothing devoted to my Captain.
Eventually, my Captain's bloodshot eyes turned skyward. "Truth be told, My Dear, I've been remiss in exploring the more profound ramifications of our collective existence. With that admitted, I dare say Singapore will be far less hesitant in accepting your wonderful gift."
I'll admit, I very nearly swooned in response.
Thankfully, Singapore had completely missed our little internal conversation; the Installation Princess conducting her crane to load the untouched Wyverns onto a waiting steam locomotive. Desperate to appear the attentive and interested friend I wished to be for Singapore, I consulted my crew for a record of what the Princess said while I was distracted.
"...not even getting into the likelihood of replicating the Wyverns and Sea Furies across the Royal Navy's carriers. Illustrious will be ecstatic, I'm sure... We'll need to obscure the origins of the aircraft, obviously." Singapore's eyes were alight with delight as she looked up at me. "Isn't that right, Repulse?"
Checking my impulsive retort at the gate before it left my mouth, I bit my tongue for a moment and instead stretched out my coiled tail until I was near level with my old friend. My cyan-skinned hand touched the Installation's cheek to a quiet gasp from the bespectacled lady and a cheeky wink from myself.
"Before you expose the Wyvern's virtues to the world, I'd much prefer if the Houses Westland and Hawker defended your castle's walls from innie interlopers." Firmly, I squeezed Singapore's cheek and laid a feather-light kiss on her forehead. "A fair lady such as yourself needs more than little old me to defend her honour..."
Singapore recoiled with a scandalised hiss just a tad too slowly to be truly enraged. Her face flushed such a ruddy crimson that I half afeared she'd burst a blood vessel. Summoning a fan from her storage, I pulled back while the blushing Harbour Princess futilely tried cooling her burning cheeks.
Just as the legends foretold, there was nought more delightful a view in all the realm than that of a blushing maiden.
And as Singapore's self-appointed gallant knight, I swore to ride forth to defend her from the foul and be-tentacled denizens of Innsmouth and the Abyss.
So swears Repulse!
Now, I'm off to write more For The Master of Mankind on QQ.
The next chapter will be in a week.
Chiao!
The first of two chapters commissioned by Darik through my Kofi here.
Music for the chapter is from Powerwolf (Joan of Arc)
In an officer and gentleman's service to the Crown, there were times when the lamentably necessary act of skullduggery became part and parcel of their duties. Some categorically rejected the call, insisting on standing above the grim necessity while becoming entangled in the political morass regardless. The higher one climbed the ranks, the more wide-reaching and potentially tumultuous the skullduggery became, as did the requirement for ever greater secrecy. For a relevant example, it'd be the height of poor form for a Captain in Her Majesty's service to undermine the public impression of their confidence in an ally.
Hence why Repulse's XO found himself treating with oriental smugglers in an opium den on the outskirts of Singapore -the city, not the Installation Royal- with a select few men.
The XO's decision was informed by the ramshackle construction of salvaged bricks, tin sheets, and steel, visibly marked by intense heat, as the den's rear entrance backed out onto the channel between the island and the mainland. A small jetty used for smuggling product across the water and down the coast now served as a temporary home to an unmarked motor launch guarded by two of Repulse's marines. Fortuitous in hindsight, as the Commander's "hosts" snuck regular glances at the doorway leading to the jetty as if afeared that the marines would storm in, guns blazing. Somewhat laughable, given the six armed thugs pretending to lounge on ratty sofas were armed with a hefty selection of modern firearms split between assault rifles and automatic pistols. Perchance, the threadbare rugs and cheap bead curtains separating each consumption booth were less of a grimy affection than the Commander initially assumed.
Of course, both of the marine guards, as did the XO, discreetly assumed the appearance of the men they used to be before their ship sank and took them to the bottom.
It wouldn't do to terrify the smugglers overmuch, after all, if they were to secure the oriental's underhanded services.
Just a tad.
Rolling the empty opium smoker between his fingers, the XO let slip a minuscule fragment of his other self and looked up with the dead, pupilless eyes of a fish. Set in an otherwise hawkish man's face, the lead smuggler subtly jerked and paled, the Commander pretending that the other man's hand hadn't darted to the heavy pistol at his hip. A blink later, the officer's eyes were a normal, piercing green that conveyed a weight of patriarchal disappointment, which only one such as Repulse's executive officer could portray without condescension.
"Fifty thousand pounds per man to ship them to Ceylon," unhurried, the XO tugged at the cuff of his tropical white shirt. "You want half a million sterling in the modern coinage for a simple hop to Ceylon, not even the subcontinent proper."
To the smuggler's credit, he was savvy when money was on the line.
All subtle fear melted away as the ringleader took a long pull from his opium pipe and raised his free hand with outstretched digits. "I am already cutting my margins dangerously tight for that low price, Honoured Spirit."
"One: Singapore's patrols are deep and intensive, far beyond even the old republic's judiciary and twice as ruthless in the face of illegal behaviours."
Closing his eyes for a heartbeat, the XO's mental gaze tracked a sodden presence meandering up the path from the channel bank.
"Two: You yourself admit that detection means failure and shame, enough to command a premium for discretion."
Struggling under the weight of an unseen load, the visitor escaped the cloying mud and paused to converse with the marine guards before forging ahead,
"Three... Ship Spirits patrol the Indian Ocean, and especially Malaysia's coastline. Unless your chosen men can adequately disguise their unique nature from the spirit's all-seeing senses, I must contend with my organisation being labelled Hostis humani generis for helping you."
The left side of the XO's lips minutely twitched when the presence made sure to kick the muck off their boots outside the door before loudly clearing their throat.
"Ah've got a delivery for a Mister Officer, first name Executive!"
Unfolding himself from the sofa with nary a hint of motion, the XO practically glid through the panicking orientals to open the door and favour the soaking sailor on the other side with a raised eyebrow.
"You're late, Baxter."
"Ah got entangled with some queer-lookin fish people from the far bank, Sah," was the burdened Baxter's response as he hefted the massive wooden crate in his arms. "Still got her on time, didn't ah?"
Offering a noncommital hum, Repulse's executive officer cocked an ear to the angry Mandarin shouts at his back while giving the crate a once over. Still intact despite the submersible trek and the thick pitch sealing the lid from the water looked intact to his questing gaze. Content that the valuable contents hadn't been damaged in transit, the XO silently extended his hands and accepted the several hundred kilos of crate without a sound.
"Remind me to mark you down for impudence, Midshipman," he dismissed the grinning sailor.
Mindful of the doorway's width, the hawkish officer carefully returned inside the opium den with the crate in hand and peered over the lid to find himself gazing down the shaking barrels of several firearms. With tension thick enough to blunt even Repulse's bow, the XO briefly ruminated on the best course of action before cutting straight to the point.
To the ringleader, he aimed his mild ire in lightly-accented Cantonese. "Do put those away. Experienced men such as yourselves should well know that modern weapons barely affect spirits like I."
A delightfully blatant shock rippled through the hardened thugs before they lowered their weapons at a barked command from their leader. Sloppy, the XO privately labelled the dreadful showing yet let nothing slip as he moved to drop the crate with a resounding bang. Feeling every eye in the place on him, the officer produced a short hammer and chisel from the depths of his sleeves and began breaking the pitch seal. He was nearly three-quarters of the way through the process when the ringleader started hovering over his shoulder.
"Your Cantonese is impressive for an Englishman."
Lining up the chisel, the XO swung the hammer with a curt bark of laughter. "Hard not to pick up the language when you were born here." A crack split the air and truncated any further conversation. "Perfect. Grab that other side there and lift."
With the ringleader's perturbed aid, they raised the lid and exposed the neatly packed rows of Sterling submachine guns gleaming from the packing oil they'd been stored in. Lamenting the necessity, a grimacing XO selected one firearm from among the batch and pulled it out to show the blank-faced smuggler leader.
"Sterlings, fresh from Naval Base George's armouries," he swapped back to English to throw the ruffian's mind off track. "One hundred guns per crate, with four spare magazines and a thousand rounds of ammunition included for free. Four more crates are in the channel; that's five hundred sterlings if you accept my adjusted deal in lieu of your proposed exorbitant prices."
Despite a valiant dismissive sniff and side-eye glare, the sharp-eyed oriental's hands lingered in the sticky pitch, refusing to release a substantial wealth in firearms now that he had them on hand.
"There are old weapons in design, if not manufacture," the leader slowly laid out, piece by steady piece. "If I wanted such, there are many areas on the mainland where more effective weapons can be found for free if one knows where to look." And yet, he couldn't tear his gaze from the sterling in the XO's grip. "Your kind were more than thorough when they tore Malaysia apart in search of blood to spill for their dark gods..."
"Let me be frank, as neither of us has time to burn this close to Singapore; your stocks of weapons old enough to harm the beasts that now reside upon the ruins of Malaysia's cities are inadequate."
Returning the submachine gun to the crate, Repulse's XO favoured the Communist guerilla -for that was who the man was, beyond a smuggler- with a predatory half-grin.
"I dare say we hate the Abyssals as much as yourself, if not more," the suspicious leader looked unconvinced, prompting a change of tack. "A fellow enemy of a common foe, then. Nothing more, nothing less. You get our men to Ceylon, and there'll be far more than mere sterlings in your hands come the spring."
For the first time, the oriental in command of this band of ruffians cast a distrustful glance at his fellows, all of whom, the XO suspected, knew no English to eavesdrop. Whatever thoughts were going through the guerilla's head, cold pragmatism won out against his ideological opposition to working with a British officer.
Even if that officer was a resurrected fragment of a man who'd drowned at sea over eighty years before.
"Ten men to Sri Lanka, then?"
"Sri Lanka, Ceylon, whatever you wish to call it, aye. Get them there without discovery, and you'll have your support."
With one last look at the crate of freshly manufactured sterlings, the smuggler nodded and offered a hand for Repulse's executive officer to shake once.
"A new war creates strange bedfellows, no?"
In that, the XO could wholeheartedly agree.
An aviation superdreadnought of the Royal Navy cannot be denied in war or peace.
"Repulse, my Dear, I cannot accept payment for tending to your most superficial of injuries," Singapore oh so stridently waged her verbal war with apt fervour. "I'd be remiss to demand recompense when you still have cracked spars!"
I was shaking my head with a fond smile long before the Installation Princess finished her impassioned declaration. Not, I hoped, in a manner that came across as smug; heavens forbid I become that uncouth with an old friend. In this, the constant movement of my hands in grabbing shrunk-down crated aircraft from my holds before depositing the full-size article on the pier undoubtedly helped soften the blow.
Humming a little ditty, I laid another Wyvern alongside the seventeen already resting in the midmorning sun for collection whenever Singapore rediscovered the usage of her cranes. As numbers three through sixteen had prompted no reaction, I suspected my slack-jawed ally felt somewhat overwhelmed with the bounty.
"Nonsense! If there is one thing I have an unreasonable glut of, it's aircraft and helicopters. Besides," I pointedly ignored the CAG's bitching in the back of his wardroom. "You need not retain the Wyverns for your airfield's use."
Singapore froze and cocked her head like some manner of adorable canine. "Are you implying what I think you are..."
A living typhoon of malformed Innie dockworkers boiled out of their boltholes and hidden residences to swarm over the crated strike aircraft and the logistical equipment necessary to unload and examine them. Standing amidst the boiling ink-black swarm, Singapore was an immobile statue of noble bearing and serenity as tiny bodies flowed around her low heels. A crate had been professionally opened and laid out in mere moments with a brief clamour of hammering and squeaking grunts. Once exposed, the constituent parts of a Westland Wyvern were examined with single-minded efficiency by the swarm before the roiling living wave all but absorbed the unbuilt strike craft.
"Truly a terrifying sight to behold," Captain Tennant mused from the safety of the weather bridge. "A sight that feels unnatural on such a lovely day as this."
I had eyes only for Singapore. "Be that as it may be, Captain, we can't deny that Singapore commands an industrious crew, which the men at Naval Base George would do well to imitate."
And that wasn't a lamenting of my fleet's construction personnel, either; far from it. Instead, it naturally percolated to the surface of my mind as I witnessed the throbbing and shifting blob of busy little gremlins spend several minutes covering the Wyvern. My crew naturally ceased unloading the remaining payment aircraft and hung out at the edge of the flight deck, dozens of curious sailors and airmen taking a break to watch Singapore at work. Separate from the visible was that intangible realm from when the Drums in the Deep originated, whose siren song filled my ears yet never deigned to grace my finned ears. I stared at the buried Wyvern and saw nought, for my mind was elsewhere, buoyed aloft by the symphony of Singapore's soul.
Were there a musician, living or dead, claimed to be the pinnacle of their art, I would be the first to decry them as a charlatan.
My own heart of hearts, patchwork as it was, rose alongside the shrill cry of port locomotives, reverberated to the rhythm of riveters at work and sang in chorus with the victorious rush of a ship racing down the slipway. All the industrial power of a port and shipyard condensed and filtered through the will of a single embodied woman whom I owed more than I might ever repay in a dozen lifetimes. Tugging a rag from the cavernous depths of my bosom, I dabbed freely at the salty droplets crowding in the corners of my eyes lest my view of Singapore be rendered incomprehensible. In the bespectacled avatar's soul song, I bore reverent witness to powers beyond mortal ken turned toward building, repairing and bringing new life into a world that daredn't deserve their innocent presence. An old ally turned new friend was Singapore, and I was proud to continue drying my leaking eyes until the industrious swarm of miniature gremlins receded and exposed a complete Wyvern on the damp concrete.
Around me lay a ring twenty metres across, shining cleanly in the sun from the invisible deluge I'd inadvertently caused. Flustered, I attempted curling my tail around myself in contrition, only for a frighteningly intense Singapore to appear far within my personal space. One painful sting on the nose later, I was staring down the length of my compatriot's extended trigger finger at the sharp eyes behind it.
"What do you call this?" The manicured digit swung around with an echo of a dock crane to land on the Wyvern.
My ears twitched and flushed a deep indigo. "A Westland Wyvern?"
"No!...Well, yes, but no!"
Sharing a mental shrug with Captain Tennant, I watched Singapore furiously stomp over to the big-boned strike fighter with no clear idea of her intent, only that the soul song was never far from my ears. She prowled around the aircraft in what might have been intense silence if not for the outright grumbling pouring from the Installation's pursed lips every time she paused to examine a specific part. I wisely kept my trap shut in the vain hope that the fey mood that'd overtaken my companion was a short-lived beast, yet it was not to be so.
Out of the blue, Singapore leaned across the left wing to glare at me. "Where's the Abyssal essence, Repulse? My workers reviewed every nut, bolt and link on this, and I thought the crews were insane when they proved unable to spiritually compress the craft."
'Spiritually compress'...?
"But no, you really did leave seven thousand pounds of supernaturally inert aircraft on my pier, as if I hadn't seen your crew unload it from your rigging in front of my eyes!" I cringed as phantom cutting torches hissed beside my head. "Do you know what you've done... No, of course, you don't; why would you? I'd be better off pretending this hasn't broken every conceivable law of the Deep Magicks."
Somewhat shyly, I raised a hand. "Pardon me, Singapore,"
Much like a punctured tyre, the Harbour Princess' unnatural fervour vanished into the muggy heat of a Malaysian sunny day without a sea breeze. Left behind was an altogether lesser woman in stature and soul, at least until the industrial symphony swelled and colour returned to Singapore's cheeks. Caught in profile by an errant sunbeam, I marvelled at the noble beauty's unbowed, straight and perfect posture despite her invisible ailment.
"Repulse," a flicked hand brought a crane boom swinging to hover over the crated aircraft. "Once again, you've managed to take an ironclad rule of my existence- that being Kanmusu and Abyssal aircraft are inherently magical entities- and produced an aircraft indistinguishable from a Human-made craft."
Having retreated to the privacy of my battle bridge, Captain Tennant tugged at a non-existent beard with his clawed gauntlets. While the resulting screeching of metal on metal had several of the bridge crew covering their ears, none dared interrupt their CO's contemplative moment.
And nor did I, for I was if nothing devoted to my Captain.
Eventually, my Captain's bloodshot eyes turned skyward. "Truth be told, My Dear, I've been remiss in exploring the more profound ramifications of our collective existence. With that admitted, I dare say Singapore will be far less hesitant in accepting your wonderful gift."
I'll admit, I very nearly swooned in response.
Thankfully, Singapore had completely missed our little internal conversation; the Installation Princess conducting her crane to load the untouched Wyverns onto a waiting steam locomotive. Desperate to appear the attentive and interested friend I wished to be for Singapore, I consulted my crew for a record of what the Princess said while I was distracted.
"...not even getting into the likelihood of replicating the Wyverns and Sea Furies across the Royal Navy's carriers. Illustrious will be ecstatic, I'm sure... We'll need to obscure the origins of the aircraft, obviously." Singapore's eyes were alight with delight as she looked up at me. "Isn't that right, Repulse?"
Checking my impulsive retort at the gate before it left my mouth, I bit my tongue for a moment and instead stretched out my coiled tail until I was near level with my old friend. My cyan-skinned hand touched the Installation's cheek to a quiet gasp from the bespectacled lady and a cheeky wink from myself.
"Before you expose the Wyvern's virtues to the world, I'd much prefer if the Houses Westland and Hawker defended your castle's walls from innie interlopers." Firmly, I squeezed Singapore's cheek and laid a feather-light kiss on her forehead. "A fair lady such as yourself needs more than little old me to defend her honour..."
Singapore recoiled with a scandalised hiss just a tad too slowly to be truly enraged. Her face flushed such a ruddy crimson that I half afeared she'd burst a blood vessel. Summoning a fan from her storage, I pulled back while the blushing Harbour Princess futilely tried cooling her burning cheeks.
Just as the legends foretold, there was nought more delightful a view in all the realm than that of a blushing maiden.
And as Singapore's self-appointed gallant knight, I swore to ride forth to defend her from the foul and be-tentacled denizens of Innsmouth and the Abyss.
So swears Repulse!
Now, I'm off to write more For The Master of Mankind on QQ.
The next chapter will be in a week.
Chiao!
Chapter Fourteen
HarakoniWarhawk
Striking from the Skies
- Location
- Holy Terra
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I want to say that this chapter fought me, but it was super easy once I sat down and found the correct music.
This is the last of Darik's commissioned chapters, so updates won't be guaranteed at any swiftness from now on. If you want to see more, I'm over here at Kofi.
Music for the chapter is from Bridge Over The River Kwai (Bridge Over The River Kwai)
If pressed, Toby hadn't the faintest clue as to why he'd clambered up the hill behind the naval base at Bloody Fuck Early O'Clock.
Looking somewhat ratty in his repeatedly washed -and somewhat threadbare at this junction- uniform, the young Lieutenant Commander picked his way past the marines on guard with nary a double take. Sure, the pair were giant fuckoff crabs wielding EM-2 rifles, but they at least made an effort to revert to a pair of regular human soldiers when they spotted Toby coming down the sliproad. Gutwrenching fears of Abyssal infiltration aside, he had long since gotten used to that peculiarity among Repulse's crew...
Or Naval Base George's now, the officer supposed, given Repulse was four hundred kilometres away in Singapore at the moment.
Still, he waved down the marine's cheery salutes and set his eyes on the burgeoning fortification works ongoing above the treeline. The air flowing into his lungs was pleasingly chill, with the sun's radiant beams just beginning to crawl across the eastern horizon, something Toby intended to put to good use. He put the cool air to good use, hiking the short, winding switchback road up the hill without breaking a sweat or pausing for breath. That said, the young Australian naval officer stopped occasionally to gaze out over the industrial beehive of Naval Base George. On the landward side of the bay, amidst the burnt-out shells of homes, the sun's light caught a plume of dark smoke from a squat brick building. Taller than anything else in sight, thanks to the belching smoke stack, Toby watched the tiny figures of workers begin rolling steel harvested from sunken Abyssals by the cartload into the waiting forgeworks.
He wasn't entirely sure as to how Lily kept dragging entire warship shipwrecks from the shallow waters of the harbour when the wrecked vessels were near-human-sized at the time of their sinking, yet salvaged whole they were.
The curious implications stuck with Toby as the tarmacked road transformed into the gravel-coated site of ongoing construction near the hill's summit. Glad for the solid boots provided by the commissary nearest his office space, strange as having an office on an Abyssal naval base was, the jovial officer stomped his way across the uneven ground without fearing a bad fall and began whistling in good cheer. Half an hour after setting out, Toby's whimsical trek brought him into view of a curiously empty construction site provided with a glut of antique machines and not a soul in sight. Cranes, tractors and even a functional example of a rusted-to-hell steam traction engine he'd once seen back home occupied the enormous concrete shell of a gun battery. Figuring there was no harm in having a poke around, the naval officer ducked under the barrier that sealed the entrance and meandered through the antiques with the distinctive aroma of freshly poured concrete filling his nose.
Toby paused at the battery's immense threshold, shielded his eyes, and peered into the surprisingly deep pit. "Huh."
"God willing, we'll have Pooh ready for firing tests come Friday fortnight."
"Agh!"
Leaping in shock as someone spoke beside his ear, Toby's windmilling body precariously tipped towards the yawning pit and his inevitable demise before a pair of furry arms wrapped themselves around his torso.
"Steady on there, old bean!"
Removed from the sheer drop with celerity by his unknown saviour, the panicking sailor was too stunned by the near-death experience to protest as he was led over to a stack of reinforced doors awaiting installation. Belatedly muttering his thanks as he was sat down, Toby blankly stared at his trembling hands before shoving them between his closed legs and waiting out the adrenaline surge. To think that he'd have fallen into the battery's pit and died, all because some asshole had spooked him from out of...
Toby's stiff jaw worked away as he saw industrial equipment to his right; momentarily, he felt relief, then glanced left and met the beady eyes of an Abyssal badger. For what else could make humanoid animals on this cursed island? The Abyssal wore a WW2-style khaki uniform adorned with an unfamiliar regimental badge on their cap and collar with a holstered revolver on their left hip.
"Morning," he reflexively offered.
"Pleasure to meet you, Commander," the badger offered a paw to shake, which Toby did out of perplexed politeness. "I noticed you admiring Pooh's future battery site and figured it'd be awfully discourteous of me to not pop in and have a wibble."
"Pooh?"
"A little nickname the lads came up with for the 14" naval rifle they're mounting up here," a furry arm gestured to the cerulean waters of the harbour. "Pooh covers the harbour, and Winnie's covering the north..."
At this point, the sailor's heart had ceased trying to shatter his breastbone with its thundering clamour. Calm as he was going to be given the circumstances, Toby dared to raise a hand and interrupt the rambling badger with the stereotypical RP accent.
"Sorry, but who are you?"
Was it prideful anger at being interrupted that met the question? Was it a lashing strike from the blunt claws ending the striped mammalian's hand paws?
Given what occurred next, Toby half-wished it'd been one of the former.
Blinking owlishly, he wasn't expecting the badger to summon a dapper cane from thin air and jump to their feet. Smoothly tucking the badger-headed rod of rich wood under their arm, the strange creature doffed their cap with a shallow bow.
"Profuse apologies, Commander Williamson! Woe is me for forgetting the gentleman's creed in my fervour to make your acquaintance." The badger returned the cap atop their head with a melancholy shake of their muzzle. "Where are my manners? Major Rupert Pennyworth-Farthington III, Royal Artillery, at your service. Presently on detached service to the Navy to train these ruffians in sterling landbound gunnery work."
Pressured to stand, Toby found his feet and grinned despite his earlier scare. "You're quite the eccentric officer, Major..."
"Rupert, please. I shant begrudge you the use of my personal name when we both serve the Lady Admiral to the best of our ability!"
"Rupert then," Toby corrected before the badger's words registered. "Lady Admiral?"
Honestly, it felt like he was repeating everything being said more than was helpful at this point. Nonetheless, it got the stripy mammal to perk up and beckon Toby to follow them to the westward edge of the construction site.
"Over there in the blue yonder," towards the distant horizon of the perfect, unblemished sea. "The Lady Admiral proves her worth in diplomacy ten-fold. Why, I can't imagine it's much easier than when I had the misfortune of meeting the Shah of Baghdad in unfortunate circumstances. I'd purchased the services of a a young lad from one of the Shah's men, you see, with three pounds of good British butter and a hundredweight of corned beef. Muhammad, that was the boy's name, was awfully glad to be away from that rogue's household when we were arrested for providing counterfeit goods!" Major Rupert scoffed. "Politics, you know how it is with the Persians. So there we were..."
Toby's stomach fortuitously rumbled, saving him from a long-winded tale at the top of a bloody hill in the tropics. Alas, the furry artillery officer couldn't have just cut his story off and returned to where he'd popped out from. No, that'd be too easy. Before Toby had a chance to flee, Rupert fuzzed, becoming briefly out of phase with the rest of reality before emerging as a blond-haired man with handsome, rugged features and the kind of immense walrus moustache that tropes of Victorian gentlemen were made of.
"Now, then," a human arm was thrown around Toby's shoulders. "Where can an officer and a gentleman break his fast in these parts?"
LINE BREAK
"... you might ask, was I able to stare down the barrel of a hundred rifles and tell the tale?
Rupert paused to take a long draught from his tea and create a sandwich of eggs and buttered toast. On the other side of the table, Toby was attempting to catch the waiter's lidless eye. The upright fish ignored the human's increasingly desperate attempts to escape his companion's furry clutches to serve port to a group of jellyfish-ferret hybrids in RAF uniforms. A snippet of the five-man unit's conversation drifted across Rupert's waffling, conducted not in English but in an unfamiliar European language Toby had no familiarity with. Cursing his luck, the Australian officer regretted not discovering the existence of the officer's mess beforehand to have gotten the staff's favour in getting away from this hell. With escape out of reach, he returned to his breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs, provided at no cost at his companion's insistence.
Where the hell did they find the eggs and flour to make this?
"Wouldn't you know, Cousin Eustace was leading our supposed foes!"
Ignorant of Toby's desperate attempts to summon aid, Rupert's moustache was home to enough crumbs to feed a small company while he continued regaling his tale of daring do.
"Cousin Eustace?" Toby regrettably echoed.
"Earnest Eustace, we used to call him!" The jovial blond-haired giant threw his head back for a belly laugh. "Eustace was the third cousin on his mother's side to the Earl of Sandwich, you know? Good chap in a pickle, if somewhat, how do you say it?" Rupert waved his fork in the air for emphasis. "'Gone native', as the broadsheets would have you call it. Cousin Eustace, now, he was as shocked to see I as we were him, what with his having vanished into the Malayan jungles on an expedition a decade past."
Despite his best efforts, Toby's curiosity at the tale made him push his breakfast aside and wet his dry lips with a mouthful of decent tea. Not the best, but given he wasn't aware of any sources for the stuff on the island, he figured it was best if he didn't delve too deeply.
"When did you say this happened?"
"Oh, late '42, I'd say. I reckon myself a deft hand with expeditions," Rupert gave an exaggerated wink that suited the gregarious artillery officer perfectly. "But the Japs had confiscated my instruments, and Eustace's mob lived so deep in the jungle they hadn't a single calendar between them. Too damp, you see. Paper, clothes, and even the leather of our boots fell apart in that God-awful sweltering heat! But by Jove, I was in a right proper state by the time we met the locals and would have settled for a few rags around my feet if it saved me from trench foot."
"Uhuh."
"Wonderful chaps, the Malay partisans. Solid, dependable, and a wicked sense of humour when they brought you in as one of their own." Unusually, a faint blush coloured the disguised Abyssal's cheeks as he looked at his near-finished meal. "Were I given the chance to visit the area, I'd like the opportunity to visit my grave. The Malays... It seems they've taken to praying to me and the others resting there these past few years."
The hairs on the back of Toby's neck rose nigh-imperceptibly as the man across from his fuzzed and once again resembled nothing more than an absolute unit of a striped badger in service khakis. Rupert blinked owlishly at the cutlery in his paws, held without issue by far larger digits, before carefully placing them on his empty side plate.
"If you'll pardon me, Lieutenant Commander, I fear I shall have to cut our breakfast short," donning his cap with the faintest waver in his voice, Rupert retrieved his dapper cane. "A spot of fresh air will do my melancholic heart a good turn, I think." He nodded at his dining companion. "Should you wish to meet for luncheon another time, the battery telephone will be wired up by tonight. Good day, Sir."
Toby hid his reflexive apology with a mouthful of tea out of politeness's sake and let the larger-than-life artillery Major leave the officer's mess at his own pace. The longer he remained on this strange, strange island, the less of his Abyssal knowledge stayed relevant or even trustworthy. Were it confined to Repulse, the young Australian sailor could chalk it down to the mutant Re-class' general aura of weirdness and rule-bending. But he'd spent most of the morning with Rupert, and the gregarious badger had seemingly popped out of thin air along with a 14" battery construction site while Repulse was away in Singapore.
"And they told me that the shipgirl service would be mainly paperwork," the officer muttered before eyeing his remaining eggs and toast. "Seriously, where did they get the ingredients?"
Did Toby want to know?
After breakfast, he decided. Best to enjoy his appetite while it lasted or before Boa and Python's latest contraption shot down half of the base's air compliment.
Repulse couldn't return quickly enough.
LINE BREAK
"Renown!"
Before Renown had an opportunity to speak, a scantily clad USN carrier had proceeded to latch onto her forcefully enough that the battlecruiser rocked back on her heels. A quick shift to quarter-speed and back again nullified the backward cant, allowing Wasp to bounce off without harm and grin up at the taller capital ship. The carrier's gaggle of Four-Stackers, Wickes herself included, zoomed around in an excitable spiral of youthful exuberance.
A significant part of that was from the presence of Kronprinz Wilhelm, who greeted each destroyer girl in a timely, friendly manner and a bar of chocolate.
"It your job to shepherd the steel lump over to home for a rebuild?"
Renown turned to a grinning Wasp with a furrowed brow. "Beg pardon?"
Her strawberry-blonde friend inclined her head towards the short German dreadnought, emerald eyes returning to Renown for a wink and a nudge. Standing as both were atop unseasonably calm waves in the middle of the Atlantic, the gesture did little to unbalance either shipgirl.
"Don't give me that look! I get that the brass wants it kept under wraps for 'security reasons'" Here, Wasp rolled her eyes and made air quotes. "But you can't tell me that the first of the Scapa Flow wrecks to return leaving port heading west is anything but a poorly disguised trip for some badly needed improvements." The buxom carrier nudged her companion again. "C'mon, spill the beans on how long you'll be in my neck of the woods."
Alarm bells started ringing in Renown's bridge, and only that the effect was undoubtedly mental prevented her from calling General Quarters and going to battle stations there and then. Still, she laid a hand over her racing heart while her Captain and XO poured over patrol charts in case the battlecruiser and her dreadnought friend had accidentally stumbled across a USN patrol.
Nothing, and certainly not a grinning Wasp whose omnipresent cheer gained a downward curve at the edges.
"Renown?"
Shaking her head, Renown put on a brave face. "My orders are to proceed to Halifax... Indefinitely." She was proud that her voice never wavered as Wasp's grin died. "Kronprinz wasn't part of that deployment order; I would hazard a guess that the Commodore is quite put out about her absence right about now."
Feeling someone grip her limp right hand, Renown glanced appreciatively at the vertically challenged dreadnought in question. Said appreciation transformed into concern when Kronprinz stared intently at Wasp until the carrier looked away and started fiddling with the zipper of her open hoodie.
Kronprinz gave a nod. "Were Commodore Bigglesworth a more honourable officer, he would not have cast my Renown aside like so much flotsam."
Scandalised, Renown gasped. "Kronprinz, you cannot say such things about the Commodore!"
"I just did," was the dreadnought's plain response. "You have served ably and loyally these past five years; any officer who refuses to reward such leal service is not fit to command you. Besides," a sly little smile briefly landed on the German warship's cute features. "I can not say I ever liked Bigglesworth's company; to him, I was a, how do you put it, a piece of the Flow's furniture."
"That's..."
Guilt and some measure of shame killed the defence before it gained true life beyond Renown's lips, her expression falling as she mouthed words her heart nor mind agreed on enough to voice. Blunt as her best friend's words were, Kronprinz had the right of it in her own particularly bellicose manner. Touched to the very heart by the loyal concern for her honour, the Royal Navy battlecruiser squeezed the dreadnought's hand in as close to a thanks as her shaky decorum could achieve.
"If you're not coming over to refit stumpy here," Wasp began, oblivious to Kronprinz's gimlet eye at the nickname. "And the Admiralty kicked you out of your home port without even a going-away party, then why... Oh."
Poor Wasp found herself targeted by interested gazes backed up by the full force of coincidence and parallax rangefinders at lethally close range. Faced with thrice her tonnage in curious ships of the line, any reluctance to speak on the USN carrier's part swiftly collapsed with a nervous rubbing of the back of her neck. Perhaps understanding that her silence couldn't last forever, Wasp stuck two fingers in her mouth and unleashed a piercing summoning call.
"Hey, Wickes!"
The lead ship of the Wickes-class destroyers rocketed away from her younger siblings, appearing as a young girl of perhaps ten years of age dressed in an adorably oversized navy greatcoat, sailor uniform, stockings and skirt. Wickes was inside the capital ship's immediate vicinity within ten seconds of the whistle, one hand still involved in wiping away a chocolate stain from the corner of her mouth.
"Ahoy, Cap. Whatcha need?"
Wasp fingered the string of her compound bow. "Mind telling Renown and Kronprinz here what you saw on Twitch the other day."
Immediately, the tiny slip of a Four Stacker went wide-eyed, whirling on a thrashing sea to gape up at the concerned-looking British battlecruiser. Like seeing Renown for the first time, the blonde escort ship abruptly beamed, exposing a mouth missing half a dozen teeth.
"Repulse's back!"
...
"WICKES, YOU LITTLE SHIT!" Wasp's outraged scream washed over the destroyer like water off her coat's oiled surface. "YOU'RE MEANT TO LEAD UP TO THAT, NOT START WITH IT!"
"Ooooohhhhh."
What might be called shame if you were half blind and viewing it from the moon flashed across Wicke's face nearly too swiftly to catch. Indeed, the precocious girl was far more involved in bouncing up and down in excitement, thus setting off a wave of copycat behaviour from her watching sisters.
"So, yeah, like, Repulse is back and super-duper extra-double stacked!" Wickes seemed not to notice Renown's abject embarrassed flush in her need to babble. "There I was with Clem, building some horrific abominations in UAD when our Chat started going wild about a snake lady with boobs way bigger than her head. Like..."
Neither possessing the figure nor height to pull her impression off, the destroyer summoned two depth charges and held them in front of her like some bizarre parody.
"This big." Wickes lobbed the explosive barrels over her shoulder in lieu of storing them away, earning another howl from a mortified Wasp. "Anyways, Clem figured we could do a reaction stream, so we popped over to Singapore's channel, and wouldn't ya know, the snek with the massive fuel bunkers called herself Repulse! Huge-aft, funky-looking Re-class, too!"
Imaginary ocean water flooded Renown's boilers as the fateful word was uttered again. "Re... Repulse?"
Kronprinz held up a hand. "Did you happen to joke about the humorous pun to be had with Repulse being a Re-class?"
Now it was Renown's turn to join Wasp in making scandalised noises as Wickes cheered and fist-bumped the German dreadnought.
"That's what I said! You should have seen Singapore's face when Repulse slithered up to her, all super-British-like." Trailing off, the destroyer squinted at the squat capital ship. "You don't seem too shocked, Jerry."
"My sisters wished to pass on congratulations to Renown on her twin sister's return in such impressive form."
"Ain't your sister-ships lying at the bottom of Scapa Flow?"
"Indeed." Kronprinz's laze-faire shrug drew horrified looks from Renown and Wasp. "They speak to me in my dreams."
"Huh, the more ya know."
Apparently unaffected by the potentially ground-shattering news, Wickes held out a hand and received another chocolate bar for her troubles. Unwrapping the treat, she turned her back on Kronprinz being mobbed by voracious destroyers and ate half the bar in one bite.
"So, like, Repulse is back as a fat-aft Re-class and way too British to be a real Abyssal." Wickes eyed the red-faced Wasp and pale-faced Renown with a certain impish gleam in her brown eyes. "If ya don't believe me, just ask Haida when you get to Maple Syrup Land; she's been sitting on her aft watching Singapore's streams, the lazy tub."
Understandably, Renown sniffed, ordered her Captain to assume his duties and fell unconscious standing up.
Wickes is a little shit, news at ten.
This is the last of Darik's commissioned chapters, so updates won't be guaranteed at any swiftness from now on. If you want to see more, I'm over here at Kofi.
Music for the chapter is from Bridge Over The River Kwai (Bridge Over The River Kwai)
If pressed, Toby hadn't the faintest clue as to why he'd clambered up the hill behind the naval base at Bloody Fuck Early O'Clock.
Looking somewhat ratty in his repeatedly washed -and somewhat threadbare at this junction- uniform, the young Lieutenant Commander picked his way past the marines on guard with nary a double take. Sure, the pair were giant fuckoff crabs wielding EM-2 rifles, but they at least made an effort to revert to a pair of regular human soldiers when they spotted Toby coming down the sliproad. Gutwrenching fears of Abyssal infiltration aside, he had long since gotten used to that peculiarity among Repulse's crew...
Or Naval Base George's now, the officer supposed, given Repulse was four hundred kilometres away in Singapore at the moment.
Still, he waved down the marine's cheery salutes and set his eyes on the burgeoning fortification works ongoing above the treeline. The air flowing into his lungs was pleasingly chill, with the sun's radiant beams just beginning to crawl across the eastern horizon, something Toby intended to put to good use. He put the cool air to good use, hiking the short, winding switchback road up the hill without breaking a sweat or pausing for breath. That said, the young Australian naval officer stopped occasionally to gaze out over the industrial beehive of Naval Base George. On the landward side of the bay, amidst the burnt-out shells of homes, the sun's light caught a plume of dark smoke from a squat brick building. Taller than anything else in sight, thanks to the belching smoke stack, Toby watched the tiny figures of workers begin rolling steel harvested from sunken Abyssals by the cartload into the waiting forgeworks.
He wasn't entirely sure as to how Lily kept dragging entire warship shipwrecks from the shallow waters of the harbour when the wrecked vessels were near-human-sized at the time of their sinking, yet salvaged whole they were.
The curious implications stuck with Toby as the tarmacked road transformed into the gravel-coated site of ongoing construction near the hill's summit. Glad for the solid boots provided by the commissary nearest his office space, strange as having an office on an Abyssal naval base was, the jovial officer stomped his way across the uneven ground without fearing a bad fall and began whistling in good cheer. Half an hour after setting out, Toby's whimsical trek brought him into view of a curiously empty construction site provided with a glut of antique machines and not a soul in sight. Cranes, tractors and even a functional example of a rusted-to-hell steam traction engine he'd once seen back home occupied the enormous concrete shell of a gun battery. Figuring there was no harm in having a poke around, the naval officer ducked under the barrier that sealed the entrance and meandered through the antiques with the distinctive aroma of freshly poured concrete filling his nose.
Toby paused at the battery's immense threshold, shielded his eyes, and peered into the surprisingly deep pit. "Huh."
"God willing, we'll have Pooh ready for firing tests come Friday fortnight."
"Agh!"
Leaping in shock as someone spoke beside his ear, Toby's windmilling body precariously tipped towards the yawning pit and his inevitable demise before a pair of furry arms wrapped themselves around his torso.
"Steady on there, old bean!"
Removed from the sheer drop with celerity by his unknown saviour, the panicking sailor was too stunned by the near-death experience to protest as he was led over to a stack of reinforced doors awaiting installation. Belatedly muttering his thanks as he was sat down, Toby blankly stared at his trembling hands before shoving them between his closed legs and waiting out the adrenaline surge. To think that he'd have fallen into the battery's pit and died, all because some asshole had spooked him from out of...
Toby's stiff jaw worked away as he saw industrial equipment to his right; momentarily, he felt relief, then glanced left and met the beady eyes of an Abyssal badger. For what else could make humanoid animals on this cursed island? The Abyssal wore a WW2-style khaki uniform adorned with an unfamiliar regimental badge on their cap and collar with a holstered revolver on their left hip.
"Morning," he reflexively offered.
"Pleasure to meet you, Commander," the badger offered a paw to shake, which Toby did out of perplexed politeness. "I noticed you admiring Pooh's future battery site and figured it'd be awfully discourteous of me to not pop in and have a wibble."
"Pooh?"
"A little nickname the lads came up with for the 14" naval rifle they're mounting up here," a furry arm gestured to the cerulean waters of the harbour. "Pooh covers the harbour, and Winnie's covering the north..."
At this point, the sailor's heart had ceased trying to shatter his breastbone with its thundering clamour. Calm as he was going to be given the circumstances, Toby dared to raise a hand and interrupt the rambling badger with the stereotypical RP accent.
"Sorry, but who are you?"
Was it prideful anger at being interrupted that met the question? Was it a lashing strike from the blunt claws ending the striped mammalian's hand paws?
Given what occurred next, Toby half-wished it'd been one of the former.
Blinking owlishly, he wasn't expecting the badger to summon a dapper cane from thin air and jump to their feet. Smoothly tucking the badger-headed rod of rich wood under their arm, the strange creature doffed their cap with a shallow bow.
"Profuse apologies, Commander Williamson! Woe is me for forgetting the gentleman's creed in my fervour to make your acquaintance." The badger returned the cap atop their head with a melancholy shake of their muzzle. "Where are my manners? Major Rupert Pennyworth-Farthington III, Royal Artillery, at your service. Presently on detached service to the Navy to train these ruffians in sterling landbound gunnery work."
Pressured to stand, Toby found his feet and grinned despite his earlier scare. "You're quite the eccentric officer, Major..."
"Rupert, please. I shant begrudge you the use of my personal name when we both serve the Lady Admiral to the best of our ability!"
"Rupert then," Toby corrected before the badger's words registered. "Lady Admiral?"
Honestly, it felt like he was repeating everything being said more than was helpful at this point. Nonetheless, it got the stripy mammal to perk up and beckon Toby to follow them to the westward edge of the construction site.
"Over there in the blue yonder," towards the distant horizon of the perfect, unblemished sea. "The Lady Admiral proves her worth in diplomacy ten-fold. Why, I can't imagine it's much easier than when I had the misfortune of meeting the Shah of Baghdad in unfortunate circumstances. I'd purchased the services of a a young lad from one of the Shah's men, you see, with three pounds of good British butter and a hundredweight of corned beef. Muhammad, that was the boy's name, was awfully glad to be away from that rogue's household when we were arrested for providing counterfeit goods!" Major Rupert scoffed. "Politics, you know how it is with the Persians. So there we were..."
Toby's stomach fortuitously rumbled, saving him from a long-winded tale at the top of a bloody hill in the tropics. Alas, the furry artillery officer couldn't have just cut his story off and returned to where he'd popped out from. No, that'd be too easy. Before Toby had a chance to flee, Rupert fuzzed, becoming briefly out of phase with the rest of reality before emerging as a blond-haired man with handsome, rugged features and the kind of immense walrus moustache that tropes of Victorian gentlemen were made of.
"Now, then," a human arm was thrown around Toby's shoulders. "Where can an officer and a gentleman break his fast in these parts?"
LINE BREAK
"... you might ask, was I able to stare down the barrel of a hundred rifles and tell the tale?
Rupert paused to take a long draught from his tea and create a sandwich of eggs and buttered toast. On the other side of the table, Toby was attempting to catch the waiter's lidless eye. The upright fish ignored the human's increasingly desperate attempts to escape his companion's furry clutches to serve port to a group of jellyfish-ferret hybrids in RAF uniforms. A snippet of the five-man unit's conversation drifted across Rupert's waffling, conducted not in English but in an unfamiliar European language Toby had no familiarity with. Cursing his luck, the Australian officer regretted not discovering the existence of the officer's mess beforehand to have gotten the staff's favour in getting away from this hell. With escape out of reach, he returned to his breakfast of toast and scrambled eggs, provided at no cost at his companion's insistence.
Where the hell did they find the eggs and flour to make this?
"Wouldn't you know, Cousin Eustace was leading our supposed foes!"
Ignorant of Toby's desperate attempts to summon aid, Rupert's moustache was home to enough crumbs to feed a small company while he continued regaling his tale of daring do.
"Cousin Eustace?" Toby regrettably echoed.
"Earnest Eustace, we used to call him!" The jovial blond-haired giant threw his head back for a belly laugh. "Eustace was the third cousin on his mother's side to the Earl of Sandwich, you know? Good chap in a pickle, if somewhat, how do you say it?" Rupert waved his fork in the air for emphasis. "'Gone native', as the broadsheets would have you call it. Cousin Eustace, now, he was as shocked to see I as we were him, what with his having vanished into the Malayan jungles on an expedition a decade past."
Despite his best efforts, Toby's curiosity at the tale made him push his breakfast aside and wet his dry lips with a mouthful of decent tea. Not the best, but given he wasn't aware of any sources for the stuff on the island, he figured it was best if he didn't delve too deeply.
"When did you say this happened?"
"Oh, late '42, I'd say. I reckon myself a deft hand with expeditions," Rupert gave an exaggerated wink that suited the gregarious artillery officer perfectly. "But the Japs had confiscated my instruments, and Eustace's mob lived so deep in the jungle they hadn't a single calendar between them. Too damp, you see. Paper, clothes, and even the leather of our boots fell apart in that God-awful sweltering heat! But by Jove, I was in a right proper state by the time we met the locals and would have settled for a few rags around my feet if it saved me from trench foot."
"Uhuh."
"Wonderful chaps, the Malay partisans. Solid, dependable, and a wicked sense of humour when they brought you in as one of their own." Unusually, a faint blush coloured the disguised Abyssal's cheeks as he looked at his near-finished meal. "Were I given the chance to visit the area, I'd like the opportunity to visit my grave. The Malays... It seems they've taken to praying to me and the others resting there these past few years."
The hairs on the back of Toby's neck rose nigh-imperceptibly as the man across from his fuzzed and once again resembled nothing more than an absolute unit of a striped badger in service khakis. Rupert blinked owlishly at the cutlery in his paws, held without issue by far larger digits, before carefully placing them on his empty side plate.
"If you'll pardon me, Lieutenant Commander, I fear I shall have to cut our breakfast short," donning his cap with the faintest waver in his voice, Rupert retrieved his dapper cane. "A spot of fresh air will do my melancholic heart a good turn, I think." He nodded at his dining companion. "Should you wish to meet for luncheon another time, the battery telephone will be wired up by tonight. Good day, Sir."
Toby hid his reflexive apology with a mouthful of tea out of politeness's sake and let the larger-than-life artillery Major leave the officer's mess at his own pace. The longer he remained on this strange, strange island, the less of his Abyssal knowledge stayed relevant or even trustworthy. Were it confined to Repulse, the young Australian sailor could chalk it down to the mutant Re-class' general aura of weirdness and rule-bending. But he'd spent most of the morning with Rupert, and the gregarious badger had seemingly popped out of thin air along with a 14" battery construction site while Repulse was away in Singapore.
"And they told me that the shipgirl service would be mainly paperwork," the officer muttered before eyeing his remaining eggs and toast. "Seriously, where did they get the ingredients?"
Did Toby want to know?
After breakfast, he decided. Best to enjoy his appetite while it lasted or before Boa and Python's latest contraption shot down half of the base's air compliment.
Repulse couldn't return quickly enough.
LINE BREAK
"Renown!"
Before Renown had an opportunity to speak, a scantily clad USN carrier had proceeded to latch onto her forcefully enough that the battlecruiser rocked back on her heels. A quick shift to quarter-speed and back again nullified the backward cant, allowing Wasp to bounce off without harm and grin up at the taller capital ship. The carrier's gaggle of Four-Stackers, Wickes herself included, zoomed around in an excitable spiral of youthful exuberance.
A significant part of that was from the presence of Kronprinz Wilhelm, who greeted each destroyer girl in a timely, friendly manner and a bar of chocolate.
"It your job to shepherd the steel lump over to home for a rebuild?"
Renown turned to a grinning Wasp with a furrowed brow. "Beg pardon?"
Her strawberry-blonde friend inclined her head towards the short German dreadnought, emerald eyes returning to Renown for a wink and a nudge. Standing as both were atop unseasonably calm waves in the middle of the Atlantic, the gesture did little to unbalance either shipgirl.
"Don't give me that look! I get that the brass wants it kept under wraps for 'security reasons'" Here, Wasp rolled her eyes and made air quotes. "But you can't tell me that the first of the Scapa Flow wrecks to return leaving port heading west is anything but a poorly disguised trip for some badly needed improvements." The buxom carrier nudged her companion again. "C'mon, spill the beans on how long you'll be in my neck of the woods."
Alarm bells started ringing in Renown's bridge, and only that the effect was undoubtedly mental prevented her from calling General Quarters and going to battle stations there and then. Still, she laid a hand over her racing heart while her Captain and XO poured over patrol charts in case the battlecruiser and her dreadnought friend had accidentally stumbled across a USN patrol.
Nothing, and certainly not a grinning Wasp whose omnipresent cheer gained a downward curve at the edges.
"Renown?"
Shaking her head, Renown put on a brave face. "My orders are to proceed to Halifax... Indefinitely." She was proud that her voice never wavered as Wasp's grin died. "Kronprinz wasn't part of that deployment order; I would hazard a guess that the Commodore is quite put out about her absence right about now."
Feeling someone grip her limp right hand, Renown glanced appreciatively at the vertically challenged dreadnought in question. Said appreciation transformed into concern when Kronprinz stared intently at Wasp until the carrier looked away and started fiddling with the zipper of her open hoodie.
Kronprinz gave a nod. "Were Commodore Bigglesworth a more honourable officer, he would not have cast my Renown aside like so much flotsam."
Scandalised, Renown gasped. "Kronprinz, you cannot say such things about the Commodore!"
"I just did," was the dreadnought's plain response. "You have served ably and loyally these past five years; any officer who refuses to reward such leal service is not fit to command you. Besides," a sly little smile briefly landed on the German warship's cute features. "I can not say I ever liked Bigglesworth's company; to him, I was a, how do you put it, a piece of the Flow's furniture."
"That's..."
Guilt and some measure of shame killed the defence before it gained true life beyond Renown's lips, her expression falling as she mouthed words her heart nor mind agreed on enough to voice. Blunt as her best friend's words were, Kronprinz had the right of it in her own particularly bellicose manner. Touched to the very heart by the loyal concern for her honour, the Royal Navy battlecruiser squeezed the dreadnought's hand in as close to a thanks as her shaky decorum could achieve.
"If you're not coming over to refit stumpy here," Wasp began, oblivious to Kronprinz's gimlet eye at the nickname. "And the Admiralty kicked you out of your home port without even a going-away party, then why... Oh."
Poor Wasp found herself targeted by interested gazes backed up by the full force of coincidence and parallax rangefinders at lethally close range. Faced with thrice her tonnage in curious ships of the line, any reluctance to speak on the USN carrier's part swiftly collapsed with a nervous rubbing of the back of her neck. Perhaps understanding that her silence couldn't last forever, Wasp stuck two fingers in her mouth and unleashed a piercing summoning call.
"Hey, Wickes!"
The lead ship of the Wickes-class destroyers rocketed away from her younger siblings, appearing as a young girl of perhaps ten years of age dressed in an adorably oversized navy greatcoat, sailor uniform, stockings and skirt. Wickes was inside the capital ship's immediate vicinity within ten seconds of the whistle, one hand still involved in wiping away a chocolate stain from the corner of her mouth.
"Ahoy, Cap. Whatcha need?"
Wasp fingered the string of her compound bow. "Mind telling Renown and Kronprinz here what you saw on Twitch the other day."
Immediately, the tiny slip of a Four Stacker went wide-eyed, whirling on a thrashing sea to gape up at the concerned-looking British battlecruiser. Like seeing Renown for the first time, the blonde escort ship abruptly beamed, exposing a mouth missing half a dozen teeth.
"Repulse's back!"
...
"WICKES, YOU LITTLE SHIT!" Wasp's outraged scream washed over the destroyer like water off her coat's oiled surface. "YOU'RE MEANT TO LEAD UP TO THAT, NOT START WITH IT!"
"Ooooohhhhh."
What might be called shame if you were half blind and viewing it from the moon flashed across Wicke's face nearly too swiftly to catch. Indeed, the precocious girl was far more involved in bouncing up and down in excitement, thus setting off a wave of copycat behaviour from her watching sisters.
"So, yeah, like, Repulse is back and super-duper extra-double stacked!" Wickes seemed not to notice Renown's abject embarrassed flush in her need to babble. "There I was with Clem, building some horrific abominations in UAD when our Chat started going wild about a snake lady with boobs way bigger than her head. Like..."
Neither possessing the figure nor height to pull her impression off, the destroyer summoned two depth charges and held them in front of her like some bizarre parody.
"This big." Wickes lobbed the explosive barrels over her shoulder in lieu of storing them away, earning another howl from a mortified Wasp. "Anyways, Clem figured we could do a reaction stream, so we popped over to Singapore's channel, and wouldn't ya know, the snek with the massive fuel bunkers called herself Repulse! Huge-aft, funky-looking Re-class, too!"
Imaginary ocean water flooded Renown's boilers as the fateful word was uttered again. "Re... Repulse?"
Kronprinz held up a hand. "Did you happen to joke about the humorous pun to be had with Repulse being a Re-class?"
Now it was Renown's turn to join Wasp in making scandalised noises as Wickes cheered and fist-bumped the German dreadnought.
"That's what I said! You should have seen Singapore's face when Repulse slithered up to her, all super-British-like." Trailing off, the destroyer squinted at the squat capital ship. "You don't seem too shocked, Jerry."
"My sisters wished to pass on congratulations to Renown on her twin sister's return in such impressive form."
"Ain't your sister-ships lying at the bottom of Scapa Flow?"
"Indeed." Kronprinz's laze-faire shrug drew horrified looks from Renown and Wasp. "They speak to me in my dreams."
"Huh, the more ya know."
Apparently unaffected by the potentially ground-shattering news, Wickes held out a hand and received another chocolate bar for her troubles. Unwrapping the treat, she turned her back on Kronprinz being mobbed by voracious destroyers and ate half the bar in one bite.
"So, like, Repulse is back as a fat-aft Re-class and way too British to be a real Abyssal." Wickes eyed the red-faced Wasp and pale-faced Renown with a certain impish gleam in her brown eyes. "If ya don't believe me, just ask Haida when you get to Maple Syrup Land; she's been sitting on her aft watching Singapore's streams, the lazy tub."
Understandably, Renown sniffed, ordered her Captain to assume his duties and fell unconscious standing up.
Wickes is a little shit, news at ten.
