With the action over, I headed below.
Note to self: next time, fight your ship from a protected compartment
, not the damned open-air bridge! The way you are now, it doesn't impair your situation-awareness one iota, and you're vastly
less likely to get splattered by random shrapnel. Hell, will this ship even still exist
if your meat-body gets killed? I'd followed the Abyssal War and the exploits of the ship-girls as closely as anyone else in the world, but in circumstances like this, 'fuck knows!' was
not a comforting answer, and I can't say I was at all keen to find out the hard way, either!
That actually prompted me to look myself over again, and I winced at what I saw. Even for someone who hadn't actually
expected to find himself becoming the living personification of a warship, a polo-shirt, threadbare jeans and three-ton safety-shoes were
hardly the proper look.
Not knowing quite what else to do for the moment, I made for the Captain's quarters. Much as it might feel like 'stolen valour', if I was stuck playing the part,
dressing the role might help me
feel it and, hopefully,
become what I was obliged to be. A few moments of rummaging through a wardrobe (which proved to be fully-stocked in my size!) produced a modern-style navy-blue shipboard coverall, complete with a Captain's four stripes on the rank-slide, an RNZN crest on one shoulder, and the badge of HMNZS
Royalist on the other. I tucked the accompanying flash-hood and gloves into my belt, just in case, and capped (haha) it off with the Captain's peaked hat over my headset. It felt a little silly, probably looked absurd, and it was almost certainly a gross violation of real-world protocols, but it wasn't like the Admiralty was going to call me on it any time soon.
When I was done dressing up, I checked out the mini-map display again. We were trailing about ten klicks behind
Sanctum, and TorpedoTerror's
Tenryū had closed alongside
Royalist. In fact, she was holding station line-abreast, barely thirty metres off my starboard beam. My first impulse was to tell her to back off and maintain proper separation, so we could both manoeuvre if we came under fresh attack, but even as the thought formed in my head, my headset chimed with another private call.
«Hey, Ralston, you there? Come out on deck so we can talk face to face!»
"On my way."
When I came out onto the starboard fo'c'sle deck, just forward of No.2 thirty-millimetre turret, an unmistakeably female figure was already standing at the other cruiser's port guardrail. When she saw me looking her way, she gave me a full-arm wave, and even from a hundred feet away I could see certain things. The schoolgirl-like uniform, with dark thigh-highs, pleated skirt, tie, and woolen jersey; the ear-like electronic thingumies on either side of her head; the cybernetic-looking eyepatch over her left eye, the near-glowing vivid amber of her right eye; the cocky grin that was almost a distinguishing mark in itself....
Now I know why her voice sounded so familiar when I first ran into her on the WoWs
TeamSpeak channels. I must have heard it in a dozen news-reports and docos from the Abyssal War. I raised a hand and returned the wave, smiling as I spoke into my lip-mike. "I always wondered why you favoured that hull. Good to see you're not getting bored now that the War's over,
Tenryū."
«All this
makes me wonder if it really is
, Ralston!» she returned, spreading her hands helplessly.
"Might as well call me
Royalist, now," I returned, overdoing a shrug so she could see it from that distance. "I hope you can give me some tips on how this whole 'being the personification of a ship' thing works, because right now it feels as surreal as all hell."
«First tip: after a while, you kind'a get used to it... and you also kind'a don't.»
I kind'a figured. "For whatever it's worth, I'm sorry about snapping at you earlier. Even before...
this, I got kind of over-protective about the few friends I had, and now I'm on a ship — I
am a ship! — that's basically designed as a floating defensive battery. Your torpedoes are the sword; my radar and guns are the shield." I shrugged again.
«Shields aren't really my style. But it was good to have someone to share the fun with.»
I may be pretty socially tone-deaf, but I'd spent more than enough games TeamSpeaking with (and against) 'TorpedoTerror' to recognise an oblique 'don't worry about it — and thanks for the help'. "Any time."
She nodded, then glanced at the horizon.
«Hey, uh, we don't know how many others like us are out here, and somebody needs to find them before the Abyssals do. I figure it might as well be me. You're gonna stick with Sanctum
for a while, right?»
Worried that those destroyer-kids you used to lead might be out there — and in over their heads? Fair enough. "I'm a cruiser, he's a carrier. That's kind of the way it works,
Tenryū. I'm going to see him to this 'port' he's found and make sure he'll be safe there. Depending on what happens when we arrive, I may stay with him or come out to help you look for others like us. Until I see you again: stay lucky, okay?"
«Me? Always!» Even as she grinned, her hull was starting to veer away from our parallel course, swinging away to the west-north-west.
«And don't you
get yourself killed, either, or I'll kick your ass!»
"Now
there's a clear incentive to stay alive!"
She might have been receding, but I could still see her grin get even fiercer.
«Fufufu — ya scared?»
"Of you?
Always!"
[[You guys have moved pretty far pretty fast since the last time I could post, and I've got some errands to run right now, so I'm just going to post this quick character-building bit for now. I hope to expand it into a full response to all the intervening posts/events in a little while.
Never mind: I am way too far behind to catch up with all the updates up to the time of this edit. 
In the absence of a detailed contribution, just assume that I've come along to the Boss Fight as close AA-escort to HMS Sanctum, but am staying quiet because I'm a cruiser focused solely on protecting my charge.]]
