~~~Jessica~~~

I drifted, bobbing up and down in the water. Above me an ocean wave loomed, appearing to grow larger as it approached. It carried me up, and then back down as it flowed past me. For a moment I closed my eyes and pretended I was simply in some rough water, that everything was fine.

"Jessica, are you alright?"

I rolled onto my back and stared up at the towering form of Chesapeake. The flicker in her eyes was a mere shadow of its former bonfire-self, but it still enhanced her already intimidating visage.

"No, not really." I said. "The whole 'you go big to make Jessica big as well' trick didn't work this time. I'm stuck this height for now… possibly forever. How would you feel if you were forced to spend the rest of your days at a thirtieth of your original height?"

Chesapeake gave me a deadpan stare. "It's a terrible tragedy I somehow live through."

My cheeks flushed red. "Oh yeah, you used to be what, one or two hundred feet tall? How do you deal with it, becoming so small?"

Chesapeake reached down and plucked me out of the water with one of her hands. "What is there to deal with? I sail, just as I did before. I engage in battle, just as I did before. I enjoy being in the company of my sisters, just as I did before."

Oh, well that wasn't helpful at all. I rolled my eyes as she sat me on her shoulder. "You might be small compared to a ship, but your size is perfectly normal for a human. I am small compared to a ship, and I'm also small compared to a human."

"True." Chesapeake said as she reentered our longboat. "Think of it another way though. You have been given an incredible gift, not too many people can say they've survived their own funeral."

I snorted as I wrung the water out of my toga. Hm, I had appeared back on Chesapeake in this toga. Was it my official uniform, or was it a part of me now? Could I even take it off? I almost started to disrobe (or is it distoga?), but thought better of it when I remembered that we weren't alone in the longboat.

I swung my body around to view the others in the longboat with us. Most of the human occupants were busy doing not much of anything, but Arthur was staring at me intently. I nervously raised a hand and waved at him.

"Hey." I said, not really knowing what else to say.

"Hey." He replied.

For a moment we gazed at each other. Then Arthur looked down at his arm and started picking hairs out of it.

After that riveting conversation, my gaze then connected with that of the small brown-haired girl in a tattered blue coat. Her hands were bound together, her legs were bound together, and her mouth was gagged.

"Hey." I said.

Her eyes narrowed at me.

I figured she wouldn't make much of a conversationalist, so I turned to the other figure I hadn't met before today.

Kearsarge was very different from the frigates I'd come to know. While Chesapeake and her sisters appeared to be women of average height in their early twenties, Kearsarge looked to be a short girl in her late teens. Prior to Chesapeake's Abyssalization, the sisters had all had brown hair and brown eyes. Kearsarge had black hair and blue eyes. The frigates seemed to have an undershirt of some kind on underneath their uniform, while Kearsarge had some sort of chain-link mesh beneath her tattered clothes. Finally, Kearsarge looked distinctly uninterested in anything and everything going on around her. She looked kind of sad as well.

"Hey." I said, trying to lock eyes with her. She didn't look up though. I glanced down at the bottom of the longboat beneath me, and judged the distance as 'way too fucking far' for me to jump down safely.

"Hey Kearsarge." I tried.

She looked up, briefly glancing around before laying her eyes on me. "Yes?"

"How are you doing?" I asked. She had been the one of us trapped in a hole in the ground for months. Maybe even a year, Harper hadn't been clear on how long Kearsarge had been there.

"Good." She said, looking back down.

Did she not understand I was trying to make small-talk? Oh, that was a pun now.

"How's the weather?" I prodded.

She didn't even look up. "Nice."

Well these conversations were already off to a great start. If I had a quarter for every single-word response I'd gotten, I'd have a dollar already.

"Uh, do you have anything you want to talk about?"

"Not really."

Two words. While that was progress, I needed to break out the big guns. "What's a Kearsarge anyways?"

If you want someone to talk a lot, ask them about themselves.

She looked up at me, and for a brief moment a ghost of a smile came across her face. "It's a mountain in New Hampshire. I've heard it's beautiful."

I nodded as if I'd heard it was beautiful as well. "Cool. Have you ever been there before?"

Kearsarge laughed. "Of course not, it's over sixty miles inland. I've never even seen it."

I laughed, pretending that I hadn't already guessed that. "Well do you want to?"

"What?"

I repeated myself. "Do you want to? We aren't going to be stuck in the Pacific Ocean forever, how about we all go to Kearsarge mountain in New Hampshire some time after we get back. We can make it a road trip."

"I'd like that." Kearsarge said with a wistful smile. "I'd really like to do that."

"You know what?" I said, raising my voice. "We should all do that once we get back. First, we'll go with United States to visit the first bit of the United States we come across. Then we'll drop off Alabama at a prison or military base in Alabama. After that we can go with Chesapeake to the Chesapeake. Then we drive up to Mount Kearsarge with Kearsarge. We can walk with Hopkins to go visit where Hopkins lived, wherever that was. We'll finish it all off with… uh… Constellation, I'm pretty sure NASA won't let us borrow a rocket."

Constellation, who was looming over Alabama like a prison guard, frowned at me. "While I'm not sure what NASA is, I would advise against using a rocket to visit my namesake. I was named after the stars in the American flag."

Hm. "Well, we can finish off our grand tour of… apparently the east coast of America, by going to D.C. I think the Smithsonian's got the Star-Spangled Banner somewhere in that town. I think I remember seeing it on a school field trip."

I turned to face my fellow humans. "What do you think about it guys and gals? You want to come on the Great Shipgirl Roadtrip?"

None of them were paying much attention to me. Arthur gave another small wave, but that was it. I frowned. "Guys?"

A shard of ice pierced my heart as I remembered that they couldn't understand me. They probably weren't even my fellow humans anymore. I'd have to actually be human for that to be the case.

"Jessica?"

I looked up to see Chesapeake looking down at me with concern.

I sighed. "It's taking a while for it to sink in that this is probably permanent. It's hard to rope people into your posse when all they can hear is 'hey'."

"I could translate for you." She offered. "Whenever you need to talk to another human, you could just ask me to help."

I gave her a small smile. "That could work."

~~~.~~~

As it turns out, attendance for the Great American Shipgirl Roadtrip was going to be slim. Most of the other humans wanted to just go home, and most of them didn't even live in America. Sue, who lived in Maine, promised to come with us to see Mount Kearsarge, but apart from that it'd just be me and the shipgirls.

It was evening now, and I was definitely going to be bunking with the rest of Chesapeake's crew. No matter my feelings on my current status, I did not need to have Arthur try to kick me to death again when I was trying to sleep. It'd also been a while since I'd slept in a hammock (the time after my resurrection notwithstanding), and it sort of had that vacation-y allure to it.

So I'd clambered down the hatches, and had just made my way onto the Gun Deck when hands grabbed me from behind. Startled, I jumped and nearly fell down the stairs to the Berth Deck, but the hands pulled me back. I spun around to find myself face-to-face with Captain 1.

"We need to talk." She stated.

Before I could ask her why she had to ambush me instead of, you know, just asking for help like a normal human being spooky ghost crewwoman, I was dragged off.

The captain's cabin on Chesapeake was a set of three rooms, two smaller ones on either side of a larger room. When I'd first come aboard, I'd run and hid myself in that larger room. Now I was being dragged into the room on the starboard side, which had a hammock and a small dresser packed into the tiny room.

Captain 1 unceremoniously dropped me by the hammock before throwing open the dresser drawers and rummaging through them.

"In the future, can you refrain from kidnapping me?" I grumped.

"This is important!" She defended, opening up a different drawer and throwing cape after cape after cape out of it.

"Do you seriously have a cape drawer?" I asked, unsure if I should be horrified or impressed.

"Who doesn't have a cape drawer?" Captain 1 asked sarcastically. "The answer, of course, are capeless beings who have never found life's greatest joy."

She then turned and eyed me critically. "I don't think any of mine would look good on you. You're more of a fur cape person than a cloth cape person."

"Thanks?" I offered hesitantly.

She turned back and pulled out a bundle of cloth. Rapidly unwrapping it, she revealed it to be a small mirror. She held it up to her face, nodded once, and thrust it into my hands.

"Look at yourself." She ordered, her red eyes burning intensely.

I gulped. With shaking hands, I lifted up the mirror to my face and looked into it. Fearful of what I might find, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I didn't have a second nose growing in the center of my forehead, or an ugly scar, or an outbreak of some sort. In fact, everything about my face looked normal- MY EYES WERE RED!

I screamed and dropped the mirror. In an impressive display of agility, Captain 1's hand shot out and grabbed the mirror mere inches from the floor.

In fact it was so impressive I paused in my screaming. "Nice catch." I complimented, before I resumed screaming at the top of my lungs.

Captain 1 rolled her eyes and put her hand over my mouth. "If I take my hand off, will you stop screaming?"

I licked her hand, and she made a face at me. "I'm serious, I need to know if you can calm down."

I nodded, and the captain removed her hand. I almost moved to scream again, but thought better of it.

"What's happening to me?" I asked hesitantly.

"You mean what's happening to us?" Captain 1 corrected. "While the symptoms seem less pronounced in you, it seems to be affecting all of this ship's crew who died. It seems very similar to what was affecting Chesapeake prior to the battle."

Oh no, she couldn't possibly mean what I thought she meant. "No, don't tell me."

Captain 1 gave me a shit-eating grin. "I know that this is a bad time, but there's never a good time to learn that you have Abyssal cancer. Congratulations Jessica, you have Abyssal cancer."

I screamed, then paused. "Wait, did you just seriously quote me to me? Is this revenge for me not breaking that news to Chesapeake gently, because I was under a lot of pressure then."

Captain 1 shrugged. "You deserved it. Besides, it's not like we haven't already discovered a treatment."

Really? I narrowed my eyes suspiciously. "Why do I find it strange that you, the ghost of some old dead white guys from the 1800's, have found a cure for cancer?"

Captain 1 frowned at me. "First, I want you to know that I find that description hurtful, even if there is a possibility that it is true. I am a captain of the navy, I deserve to be called such. Second, Alabama proved that either shooting or removing the heart of the problem will stop the spread, and after that it's just a matter of clean up."

"No! Just no! We are not firing a gun or cannon into my chest in an attempt to cure cancer. That sounds like a dumb idea, and you should be ashamed." I chided.

She shrugged. "We could always have the ship's doctor attempt to remove it surgically."

I about had a heart attack. "You keep that leach-loving asshole away from me! Can we just pretend it doesn't exist and forget this conversation ever happened until we reach safety, where modern doctors can deal with it?"

"Of course."

"Wait, seriously?"

"No."

I sighed. "Come to me if you have a plan that doesn't involve me getting shot or going anywhere near your ship's doctor, and I might do it. Otherwise, the answer is no."

Captain 1's expression darkened. "I'll let this slide as it pertains to your health, but the crew of this ship fall under my command. That includes you now. In any case, I still need to talk to the ship's doctor to see if operating to remove the problem is even possible before any of this can move forwards."

Fucking Abyssals and their shitty coral cancer.

"I'll try to be more respectful." I sighed. "Or at least find a more tactful way to say no."

Captain 1's expression returned to its typical bright and cheery demeanor. "Great! Now go get yourself some sleep, you look tired and I did give you some terrible news."