Alex's house wasn't any different then it had been the last two times she'd been here, but in the harsh light of the afternoon it seemed significantly more foreboding.
She knew why, of course. Today she was entering another fleet's territory, unescorted, and without the clear approval of their princess. The abyssal hadn't realized the issue until last night, but she had no idea if Alex had gained his mother's approval in this painting operation. Yes, it was likely that he'd cleared it with his princess, but she would have felt a lot better if Alex could escort her in, as proof that she wasn't trespassing on her own accord. Unfortunately, they hadn't planned any kind of rendezvous beyond that at the house, and she obviously didn't have a phone to correct the plan with Alex.
And so, Trinitite found herself uneasily standing on the sidewalk, hesitating in front of the path leading into the territory of Alex's fleet. Breathing in and prepping another boiler, just in case she had to run, she took an uneasy step onto that path, easing through the strait created by a line of hostile-looking bushes. The abyssal stopped in front of the door, suddenly unsure what to do next. Without the help of an in-built radio to request permission to enter, or the open invitation from the fleet like a restaurant or store, how was she supposed to request access?
The question was abruptly voided as the door swung open, Trinitite recoiling in surprise as an unfamiliar human's rangefinders focused on her.
"Hello!" She welcomed, the princess giving Trinitite a smile that looked surprisingly genuine. "You're Sarah, right?"
"Ah-" She stuttered, before falling back on old habits. "Aye, ma'am."
Sure, the face Alex's mother showed her seemed friendly and approachable, but so did the visage of several abyssal princesses she'd worked with. The false kindness normally didn't last long, so it was best she remained as respectful as possible, until she understood her more.
At least Alex had remembered to get her blessing before Trinitite had arrived.
"Please, come in!" She beckoned, swinging their door open. "We're not planning on eating you, you know?"
That hadn't been what Trinitite had imagined in her nervousness. With abyssal princesses, it wouldn't have surprised her, but Alex's fleet was human. They didn't do that, right?
Wordlessly, she followed through the door.
Immediately, she was struck with how different the house's interior felt, compared to other human buildings. She couldn't pin down what felt so unique before the woman spoke up again, however.
"Alex isn't back from work yet, so feel free to make yourself at home!" she offered, motioning to a pair of wide, rounded couches.
The woman was shorter than Alex, her wide, soft build giving Trinitite the disarming impression of a Wa-class. Her skin was a shade darker than Alex's, a coconut brown that betrayed its smoothness as it reflected the interior light. There still didn't seem to be any hint of malice in her eyes, so the abyssal allowed herself onto one of the couches with a soft "Thank you."
"Can I get you anything?" The human asked, "Soda? Tea? Coffee?"
The Wo-class initially wanted to say 'no,' but something in the princess's face made her reconsider, and it had been a while since she'd had some coffee…
"Some coffee would be good, thank you." She admitted, silently cursing herself.
"Alright!" She smiled, turning away from Trinitite. "It'll be right out, sweetie!"
Confused, she watched as the woman happily walked away. Why would she be alright with such a clearly lopsided deal? What could motivate a fleet to freely give resources to an outsider?
The house's central room was divided into two sections, sandy carpet and seafoam-white tiling denoting a clear borderOn Trinitite's side, between the two. The tiled side, the one the human entered, was dominated by several machines. The Abyssal suddenly recognized a grill and a microwave among them, and the purpose of the tiled part of the room clicked into place. A kitchen, then, where the fleet prepared their meals, eating them on the broad, polished wood table that dominated the rest of the open space.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" The human abruptly apologized, the wide, dark bun popping up as she straightened and looked away from a black machine resting on the cluttered counter. "I never introduced myself!" She pressed a button on the machine, speaking over the rising burble it emitted. "My name is Paloma, Sweetie."
"It's nice to meet you, Paloma." Trinitite replied, smiling back at her. Human protocols meant she should go for a handshake, but they were on opposite sides of the room, and she had been told to sit down…The machine beeped, and she turned back to tend to it.
"Alex talks a lot about you." She commented, the machine clicking as she inserted some sort of cartridge. "Apparently you're quite the tactician."
Considering her previous experience, she'd hope so.
"Alex still won last night." She tempered, but Paloma waved her off.
"He's been playing that game for years now," She dismissed, "and you've really impressed him!"
She'd impressed Alex? Trinitite shouldn't have been surprised by that, given how he'd complimented her after their game, but to know he'd relayed those praises on to his princess…
"But enough of that!" She pronounced, scooping a perfectly filled cup of coffee off the machine's pedestal. "You'll have plenty of time to talk about your board game when Alex gets here. Do you want it with sugar and milk?"
"...Yes, Ma'am." She admitted. For someone who hadn't asked anything from her yet, she was being awfully accommodating.
On Trinitite's side of the room, the couches shared the space with a squat table, its glass top allowing the Wo-class to peer through it and view several wide, colorfully-decorated books. A gigantic screen, the rest of the computer oddly absent, dominated one of the walls, the machine flanked on either side by bookshelves.
…Come to think of it, the house kind of reminded her of the library.
"So, Sarah…" The human started, placing the intricately-decorated mug on the glass table in front of Trinitite. "...Besides work and that board game, what do you like to do with your free time?"
The intentions behind Paloma's generosity suddenly became clear to her. The free drink was being offered in exchange for information. Paloma only knew of Trinitite via Alex's reports, and wanted to verify her intelligence.
Her wariness began to fade as she accepted the mug. Very well, she could afford that trade.
Lifting the drink to her lips, she took a moment to enjoy the now familiar bitter-sweet taste. She allowed herself to ponder the question, realizing that for once she could be completely honest.
"Research." She admitted, scanning the room again. "Before the war, I didn't know much about… uh…" words suddenly escaped her. How did she describe everything about humans without admitting she wasn't one? "...all of this."
"Really?" The human asked, easing herself onto the unoccupied couch. "What's the most interesting thing you've learned?"
"The most?" Trinitite leaned back in her seat, allowing her keel to ease into the cushions. She realized that her tactic of trying to get the human to focus on talking about themselves had been reversed, but wasn't certain how she could smoothly regain initiative over the conversation. Abyssal princesses, at least, never asked such open-ended questions, and some could easily be baited into spending massive lengths of time on their own opinions. This human princess, unfortunately, didn't seem so self-centered. "Well…"
What did she talk about? Trinitite wanted nothing more than to tell her sisters about everything she experienced, but describing something as well as she could and describing something to a human, in non-suspicious human terms, were very different things. She'd have to be careful in answering.
"There's so many things…" She started, trailing off as she tried to figure out how vague she could be. "History, space, technology," she glanced over at the bank of equipment that filled the kitchen, "and cooking!"
This was her opportunity to draw the focus of the conversation back to the human. She had no idea about the specifics like model and price, but she'd seen a lot of those at the local Walmart installation, when she'd been checking the price of a replacement grill. The machinery in the kitchen must have easily cost thousands of dollars! Nobody would invest so many resources into cooking equipment without having an interest in it, right?
"I'm not very good at it, though." She continued. "Haven't really had the opportunity..."
"Well, if you're interested," Paloma asked, pressing her hands together, "I could have you help me make dinner some time."
"Oh?" She was offering training? "Thank you."
Getting to use another fleet's supplies in exchange for helping prepare them was a fair trade, right? Plus, she had extra food in her hold, unusable without proper preparation, that she could give in exchange for the instruction!
Unless…
What if, instead of merely trying to learn more information about her, Paloma was giving a job interview instead? Alex had apparently praised her abilities, and perhaps had passed Trinitite's refugee story onto her. Knowing that Alex's coworker didn't currently have a family, The Princess could have figured that 'Sarah's' skills would have made a useful addition to her fleet. 'Job interview' probably wasn't the correct term for human families, but Trinitite didn't know enough about them, or what kinds of deals or trades one had to strike to join or leave them.
She successfully suppressed a shudder. She wasn't certain she still had a family, considering the uncertain fate of the Jellyfish Princess, but while there was still hope, she wouldn't abandon her princess! Paloma hadn't offered yet, and probably wouldn't, but Trinitite had her answer, just in case.
"Oh, it's no problem!" She dismissed. "I already made tonight's turkey posole, but-"
The main door abruptly swung open, Alex's beleaguered form stumbling in. He looked up at the abyssal and his princess, his shoulders irregularly rising and falling.
"Sarah, I'm so sorry!" He breathed, "Hunter showed up thirty minutes late, and I had to cover for him."
"Did he have a reason?" Sure, the Abyssal was annoyed, but not at Alex. That was one thing she wouldn't have had to worry about in an abyssal fleet: if a ship was neglecting their duties, they were corrected quickly, but Shannon didn't seem to have the power- or will- to do so, no matter how strict she acted.
"I didn't stick around to hear it." Alex shook his head. That was fair enough, she guessed.
"Well, I'll leave you two to it, then!" Paloma announced, easing herself out of the chair. "Have fun painting!"
"Thank you, Mom!" Alex's smile flashed, following his princess until she disappeared around a corner. It faded when his eyes flitted back to Trinitite, though. "Again, I'm sorry I'm so late."
"Don't worry about it." She dismissed. He had his duty, after all. Besides, the time that they'd lost in painting allowed her to secure what seemed like a pretty good deal in cooking training. The painting itself probably wouldn't take that long, anyways.
"Let's just clip one model out of the sprue at a time, so we don't lose any pieces."
The pair were sitting on the carpeted deck, now, the knee-high glass table resting between them. Trinitite's open purchase rested on the glass pane, sharing the tabletop with several paints, tools the abyssal wasn't familiar with, and an american-themed box confusingly titled the 'Legacy Starter Set.'
Accepting the clippers from Alex, the Wo-class carefully examined her sprue of choice, carefully removing the first components of her future fleet.
"You're starting with a destroyer?" He idly noted, nodding as Trinitite pried the mostly-intact Ha-class from its plastic frame.
"Yeah," Trinitite replied, "she seems the easiest one to start with." The most expendable, as well. Considering the Crossroads Fleet never had any Ha-class destroyers, if she damaged the miniature somehow she wouldn't be particularly disappointed. Her rationale was abruptly interrupted, however, by Alex's next question.
"Destroyers are female?"
What?
"Yeah?" Trinitite found her rangefinders snapping to her coworker, unable to hide her confusion. "What do you think they look like under that rigging?"
Alex's mouth worked for a second, his gaze focused on the gray warship in Trinitite's hands.
"I… didn't know it was rigging." He admitted. "To be honest, I haven't been looking into the war much."
"Ah." Trinitite replied, weakly adding "That's fine."
She wasn't sure what to say beyond that. On one hand, she could understand the sentiment. Despite being involved, the Crossroads fleet hadn't followed the war's development, either. They knew how it was going to end, after all. Everything she'd learned Trinitite had gleaned from conversations between abyssals of other fleets, hearsay that slowly filtered to Bikini and distilled down to 'the others have brought The Fire closer' or 'The Fire's coming has been delayed.'
On the other hand, wouldn't any human with an interest in survival be paying a bit more attention? Alex and his fleet didn't have nearly the same… attitude as the Crossroads Fleet did. Sure, Chehalis sat fairly far from the coast, but not outside of striking distance from the shore. Trinitite didn't think there was any chance of an abyssal attack here, but she had a rough idea of the situation in the Pacific. If he didn't even know something that basic about abyssals, then Alex must have had a lot of confidence in the Navy. Perhaps staying informed on the war was the duty of someone else in the fleet.
Then, another thought occurred to her. What if, somehow, no human knew that underneath their ferocious weapons and armored shell, lay a being who could pass for a human just as well as Trinitite? That didn't seem likely to her, destroyers typically disbanded their rigging and skipped ashore whenever they could, and there had to be plenty of human eyes watching from most of the abandoned cities and thick jungles Trinitite had seen in her life, but perhaps the Navy was hiding that information, too.
How careful should she be about sharing general knowledge, lest she accidentally reveal something no human should know?
A memory suddenly returned to Trinitite, and she relaxed. Morbid curiosity kept driving her to listen in on the transmissions that humans blasted across their territories. Considering some of the insanity she'd heard, The Abyssal could probably get away with saying anything she wanted and just claim she heard it from the radio or internet if questioned.
As her worry eased, Trinitite had no problem following Alex's directions on cutting away the mold lines. A few slips caused some nicks in the soft plastic, but Trinitite could easily pretend it was some kind of battle damage.
Since the Ha-class's form was fairly simple compared to the collection of gray limbs and turrets Alex was trying to form into a battleship, Trinitite moved onto the two I-classes long before he finished his first miniature. She made sure to take a lot more care, this time, slowly slicing the imperfections off of the destroyer's hulls. Without the destroyers of The Crossroads Fleet, she would have sunk long ago, and they had all been I-classes. Even if you didn't count their brave sacrifices, like the one CFS Groves had made to save her from a submarine's spread of torpedoes, their energetic conversations and frantic exercises provided a backdrop to life at Bikini that the Wo-class suddenly realized that she missed.
Her attention to detail allowed Alex to finish his battleship by the time Trinitite moved onto the CFS Ames. This was fortunate because it allowed Alex to help Trinitite through the more complex He-class.
"You'll have to keep it in two separate pieces, I think." He'd commented. "Just scar where the torso and rigging meet, then we can attach her after we've painted them both."
The 'scarring' process was a little unpleasant. Ames had been both an invaluable fleetmate and an amicable comrade, despite her odd insistence to refer to her primary weapons as '15 centimeter' guns, instead of the customary inches she used for her secondaries. Sinking a relatively large blade into her hard-earned miniature felt… wasteful, but it was what Alex was doing, so she followed. The He-class's head seemed to stick to her shoulders pretty well.
Finally, they got to what Trinitite had been waiting for the most: The flagships.
"Hmm," Alex mused, looking up from his own carrier. "The Wo probably isn't a great model for a beginner, but I think if we keep the hat and cape separate until we're done painting things should turn out pretty well."
Trinitite did so, studying the plastic before her. The two Wo-classes were separated into different sprues, thankfully, as with each one scattered into so many different pieces, Trinitite would have difficulty picking out which differently-posed limb belonged to which.
As she started removing and cleaning the first carrier, her rangefinders settled on the miniature's unseeing face. From how a severed hand gripped the center of a dull-gray cane, Trinitite could tell this was the miniature she was planning on using to represent Firestorm, but looking at the steel-gray face…
She was too… stoic. The cool, calculating expression suited her other sister just fine, but Firestorm had always been more expressive than this. Perhaps she could fix that somewhat when they started painting, but the abyssal for the life of her didn't know how. That wasn't the only issue she was seeing, either. The turrets in the Wo-class's rigging seemed a little too stout for the dual-purpose guns that Hypocenter and Herself used, but also too small for the 8-inchers Firestorm had. If there were some way to modify the parts to get the look she wanted, now would be the time to do so, but she didn't really know how, and certainly wouldn't bring the issue up with Alex.
While she carefully finished assembling her fleet, Alex's experience started to show. He'd already finished his capital ships as Trinitite had worked on her destroyers, but as she focused on getting her sisters correct, the human finished assembling his cruiser, two escorts, and a submarine. He was completing his last ship now, a collection of plastic pieces that looked somewhat like an escort.
The abyssal frowned, studying the colorless figures sitting next to his coworkers. With the exception of the abyssals, they were all based on real ships that were out there, right? What made Alex pick this fleet over all the others the games store offered?
"Who's that?"
The question seemed to surprise Alex, the human adjusting his box to get a look at the image of ships on the back.
"This one is… Ingham." He nodded. "A Coast Guard cutter."
"A Cutter?" Trinitite echoed. She'd seen them in her recognition charts, but had never really encountered them before. How was that different from other escorts?
"Those are what The Coast Guard call their ships." Alex informed her.
"Ahhh!" She nodded, understanding. She knew of fleets with stranger quirks. "They're destroyer escorts, then."
"I mean, I think that's underselling them, but…" He trailed off. "I don't know."
His connection, whatever it was, wasn't to the ship he was working on now, then. Fair enough, they were escorts, after all, and while she would never disparage the late destroyers of her fleet, the sheer fact they were smaller and more numerous meant they were less… memorable, especially compared to capital ships like herself.
"Who are the others, then?" she asked, her eyes drifting towards the unpainted carrier in his mini fleet. She didn't recognize the vessel, but found herself hoping Alex's interest had been with her instead of the gun-laden battleship. What did he like the most in a ship?
"Well, there's the destroyers, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. and Cassin Young, Torsk the submarine, Little Rock, Intrepid…" his voice rose with reverence as he pointed towards the battleship. "...and Wisconsin."
Her spirit couldn't help sinking a little upon hearing that he did, in fact, prefer the battleship. Still, she did her best to hide her feelings as she probed for more intel.
"You seem to like her."
"Well-" Alex's face seemed to falter for a second, "I'm sure Intrepid's doing fine. Again, I don't pay too much attention, but every American's heard of Whisky!" He exclaimed. "When the La Palma Tsunami had just hit and the Battleship Princess was trying to sail her fleet into Hampton Roads," he paused, reading Trinitite's features, "-our main naval base and shipyard is around there."
The abyssal nodded. She'd heard about the La Palma disaster, and had read about the Battle of Hampton Roads in the 1860s, but didn't know it was still so important today.
"-and Wisconsin emerges from the rubble of her hull to do battle with her evil twin!" He finished, pride dominating Alex's features. "She practically saved Virginia!"
So it was Wisconsin's actions that got his interest, then, and not what she was. That made the Wo-class feel a little better, somehow, even though her own exploits were something she'd never share with him. He'd probably be less than appreciative if he knew that she helped in the assault on Hawaii, even indirectly.
With assembly mostly finished, the two brought their disassembled fleets into a room Alex termed the 'garage.'
"It's a bit too chilly to spray primer outside," He justified, "so we'll have to do it in here."
Feeling a little useless, Trinitite stood and watched as her fleetmate spread the disparate ship parts across a wide sheet of paper, before scooping a can off of a shelf and shaking it. There didn't seem to be any obvious kind of lid to the rattling can, so Trinitite wasn't sure how exactly the primer was supposed to get out until Alex started spraying an even mist of gray primer.
It worked on compressed air, then. It wasn't the most impressive example of human technology, but Trinitite still found it pretty neat. Finished with his task, Alex straightened with a satisfied sigh, standing next to Trinitite as the pair admired his handiwork.
"So," The Abyssal broke the silence, her gaze still on her evenly-coated miniatures, "we wait for it to dry?"
"Yeah." He replied. "For two hours."
Trinitite nodded loosely. A moment passed, then another, before the silence was broken as Alex abruptly turned to Trinitite.
"Wanna watch a movie?"
Ohh, boy. It's been a crazy couple of weeks, but hey, I finished A-school, so that's a huge load of stress off my mind, and I don't have anything to do but take leave and stand watches for the next couple of months, so hopefully that will translate to more productivity in this fic.
I say hopefully, because I'd expected to get this written a lot faster then I did. The chapter has several scenes I've been looking forewords to writing ever since starting this arc, which normally translates to blazing through a chapter, but here it was really slow going. That might be because of stress due to training ramping up in the last couple of weeks, but I think it has more to do with dialogue being pretty difficult for me to write, especially in unique circumstances like these.