The Abyssal had a hard time remaining inconspicuous as she hurried out of town. The thought of the 'Abyssal Carrier Group Starter set,' now safely secured in her hold, was making her so giddy it was difficult to maintain a casual walking speed. She couldn't wait to crack it open and examine the figures inside. Sure, it was probably based on distant reconnaissance, or the rapidly-decaying hulk of a dead Wo-class it's makers might have gotten their hands on, so it was probably full of all kinds of inaccuracies, but Trinitite was sure she could look past those. Crossing a set of railroad tracks, she tried to focus on the rest of her night, to help her wait.

After watching Alex's army fail, she'd been asked to grab an unused army from another human, and strip it down to match his. Looking at his forces, which all seemed to form the same purpose as her own screening force, she'd opted for dropping most of her infantry and focusing on artillery. It still would mean being far closer to combat then she would have liked, but given the short sight-lines and millions of places to hide on land she guessed that was about as close as she'd be able to get.

Anyways, her 'bright' idea of staying away from combat while Alex screened her proved to be incredibly dumb, joining the flailing campaign in China and failure to dislodge humans from Oahu as evidence that abyssals did not understand land combat. She just hadn't realized Cameron's… things could move that fast! She'd never actually asked what the massive red people were supposed to be, thinking she could pick up enough through context, but that had failed.

No matter what they were supposed to be in the fantasy, he'd definitely attacked Alex's out-of-position screen intentionally. It was a little insulting to Trinitite, realizing her opponent was blatantly allowing her artillery to do their duty unmolested, but not so much that she'd been unwilling to take advantage of the situation. She hadn't realized how vulnerable she really was until a handful of Cameron's army hit her own, and the combat disparity was obvious.

The idea of someone using a weapon with such a short range, like a sword or their bare hands, over guns had felt ridiculous to the abyssal. She'd heard of abyssals on land resorting to their horsepower and rigging in the crowded jungles of Southeast Asia, but they hadn't really had any functional ranged weapons anyways, without their hull form to anchor them. When the 'raptors' started removing her 'conscripts' from the table, she could actually imagine the raptor's blades slicing through thin uniforms, muscle, and bone, and how their fleetmates would panic so quickly. This is what they meant by fantasy, then?

She was afraid her artillery was going to lose her screen entirely, before Alex informed her about her Commissar, and she realized her army operated off of Abyssal Princess doctrine. It wasn't her preferred tactic, but it wasn't like her conscripts were actually real people, and it did mean her screen remained until she could command her large guns to fire on the melee.

She didn't understand why everyone else had found that so funny, until they played the results out and killed everyone. Now, she realized just how powerful high explosives could be in cramped land combat, and had earned the nickname of 'Commissar' from Cameron. She wasn't so sure how she felt about that last part. Being related to someone as supposedly brutal and driven as a commissar wasn't quite being related to the humans' idea of an abyssal, but it was closer then she was comfortable. Plus, the idea of being thought of as cold and uncaring by her fleetmate… bothered her. She wasn't really like that! When she was in command, Trinitite would do everything she could to protect her charges and fleetmates!

The familiar hiking trail appeared before Trinitite, and her footfalls started to quicken as she left town. By the time she'd found a smaller trail off the official one, she was jogging, hurrying to find another shelter. There, not too far from the path, the undergrowth parted around a particularly thick and gnarled tree. She didn't have the room to comfortably lie down, but she wasn't really planning on sleeping here.

With her aft leaning against the tree and her knees curled up to her chest, Trinitite anxiously withdrew a flashlight she'd bought, toggling it on and setting it aside for now. If she'd wanted, her eyes would provide enough glow to observe her new purchase, but she'd been finding that she preferred the pure, white light the flashlight provided. Slowly, carefully, she slid the box out of her hold, admiring the image on the front for a second. It'd be a shame to just recklessly tear into this, wouldn't it? With the flashlight balanced between her teeth, the abyssal inspected it closer, cautiously picking at the seams until she discovered the clear material holding the box together. Peeling it was a simple matter, and she had the side of the box open. Her hands were shaking at this point as she anxiously reached in, anxious to see how well they'd portrayed her.

The fingers withdrew, revealing… dull, uninspiring gray. What?

Removing the object fully, she inspected it closer, rotating it in the harsh light to determine exactly what the object was. Where was her Wo-class?

She felt like she was falling. Inside the frame, colorless plastic was formed into several oddly-shaped deformities, each surrounded and tenuously connected to the regular, square frame that made up the visual bulk of the… thing. Only by turning it in the harsh artificial light did she suddenly recognize the form of some kind of humanoid, its head missing and other parts connected to the frame around it at seemingly random intervals. Inspecting further, she found the ruffled form of a Wo-class's cape, frozen in rigid waves. There was the upper portion of her rigging, turrets and tentacles conspicuously absent as it was suspended in plastic. Finally, she came across the dull, underwhelming form of one of the Wo-classes, the arm and cane she'd seen the Wo use on the picture sitting almost on the opposite side of the frame, and she came upon a sudden, infuriating realization.

She'd been cheated.

This was her 'abyssal carrier group?' Had she just wasted the last of her money on a bunch of- no, a single piece of plastic, where parts of it resembled what was proudly displayed on the back of the box?

Her hands were shaking again, but for a different reason. Slowly, deliberately, she stowed it back in the box, sliding it back into her hold and waiting for it to be secured by her suddenly-nervous crew. The flashlight went next, the glow in her eyes more than enough for her to see the clearing around her. Trinitite stood, taking a step away from the tree. She allowed herself a moment to close her eyes, then concentrated. A familiar pain, one that had been lingering somewhere in her consciousness ever since she'd lost her fleet, suddenly flared as she brought her wound back into reality, but that was fine.

It would help to focus her anger.

The loose tennis shoes she'd been wearing were gone, her hull rising as dark heels encased her feet. Baggy clothes disappeared, replaced by the familiar closeness of a bodysuit. She could feel the foundation and lipstick fall away from her face, and as she uncovered her rangefinders, a stray lock of hair let her know the hair dye she'd used had lost its dye as well. Her hand moved by instinct, grasping a dark, jagged cane.

She could feel it. Not just her in her fingers, wrapped around the tool, but also how the air brushed against it, and the texture of the dirt it was settling into. It was a part of her rigging, after all, as much of a part of herself as her hands or flight deck. She hadn't realized how much she'd missed this feeling, this… expansion of herself. If only she could have given herself the full experience, to step into the deep blue and remember what it was like to be an aircraft carrier again.

Wishes were useless, however. She might as well have wished for her sisters back. What she had now would be enough to help with what she was planning to do.

She turned, noting how the clearing to the port of her was much better lit then it was to starboard. Another reminder of the damage to her flight deck, island, main battery, and 'hat,' if the constant pain wasn't enough of one. Flexing her tentacles and suppressing the nostalgia that came from having eight limbs again, she cautiously wrapped them around the trunks and branches of several other trees in the clearing, steadying herself. An attempt to anchor herself into the ground by jumping and shoving her heeled feet into the ground only resulted in a crater, so she'd have to hope her grip on the surrounding foliage would be good enough.

Now, her rangefinders focused on the real target.

In the old, worn tree that dominated this clearing, Trinitite focused her imagination. In the pillar of old wood, she saw the hull of that oversized destroyer who'd dogged her here, the human who'd threatened to kill her and everyone who'd been unlucky enough to be around her, the abstract, roughly-depicted face of the carrier who might have attacked her home, and the man who'd convinced her to waste the last of her money on some useless plastic.

There was a crack as the cane suddenly moved, a flick of the Wo-Class's wrist effortlessly propelling the tip past the sound barrier. It slammed into the unfortunate tree in a cacophony of splinters and shreds of bark, the cane rebounding from a jagged wound in the tree's side.

She'd been cheated!

Rage boiled in her pipes as she studied the wounded tree. She didn't even have the money to buy lunch for the majority of next week, but that had been a sacrifice she'd been willing to make… for what she'd been promised. Knowing that that promise had been hollow, that her money had been so cheerfully taken from her, it- it just-

She swung again, whipping enough force into the strike that her tentacles had to brace to counteract the recoil. The tree exploded where the cane found it, a wave of debris bracketing Trinitite. Cracks had proliferated the rest of the tree, a healthy portion of the plant shearing off and falling into the clearing in a storm of flapping leaves and snapping branches.

This wouldn't have been as much of a problem if she'd been paid daily, like in her old job. Why couldn't Shannon get her the money she'd earned at the end of the day she'd earned it? When was she getting that money? How much more of this… this shit would she have to deal with before she found her mother? Would she ever find her?

In rage and frustration, she struck the tree one last time, a scream escaping her as she put the full power her turbines could extract from her active boiler into the attack. As soon as she struck the battered remains, however, all hell broke loose.

The impact sent shockwaves reverberating through her hull, aggravating old wounds in a flash of pain. Branches her rigging had wrapped around to anchor herself suddenly gave way, crashing down around the abyssal as she spun away from her strike. The loose ground didn't help her footing, and soon she was in the air, falling to the ground surrounded by the remains of the trees around her. The crash of further breaking timbers and whistle of tumbling branches was drowned out by her own internal chaos, her crewmembers abruptly thrown from their racks and watch stations as she hit the ground with an unceremonious thud. The debris around her found her a moment later, and for a second she was buffeted by the falling remnants of the vengeful tree she'd destroyed…

But when silence descended again, she was unhurt.

The Wo-class blinked, unwilling to move as the tranquil night overcame the commotion she'd caused. In the new peace, a memory returned to her, one of Alex's friends saying that they hadn't brought an army because they hadn't been fully painted yet. Did that mean that all the miniatures she'd seen came in a similarly unfinished manner?

This… predicament… was entirely her fault, then. Just like dozens of others.

Trinitite knew that, without any sense of pride or boasting, she might be one of the luckiest abyssals in the world. She'd survived an attack that had destroyed her entire fleet, with one possible exception. She'd managed to slip through the US Navy to get to the west coast, again mostly through luck rather than skill. She wasn't entirely certain what they did after she made landfall, so she wasn't sure how fortunate she was to evade them on land, but the fact that she hadn't seen anything from them since then indicated some luck in that field, too.

If only she wasn't so good at squandering that good fortune!

There was her idiot decision to leave her bridge lights on that night at Mill Creek. The fact she'd never even considered her endurance on the construction site might have been suspicious until well after the terrified Alton had exposed her. There was her unforgivable mishandling of the supplies she'd taken from the Fred Meyers Fleet, and so many smaller blunders that she was sure she couldn't count them all. And now, there was this…

She blinked again, fighting to keep the sudden tears from obscuring her vision. When she'd first started trying to seem human, she'd been able to excuse her missteps via her inexperience, but now that excuse was starting to wear thin. She knew more about humans than any other regular abyssal, but everything she learned only seemed to expose new and completely unexpected dangers. Worst of all, there didn't seem to be an end in sight.

Sniffing, she tried to stand, rolling shattered branches off of her and creating even more of a commotion. She'd made another mistake by lashing out so close to human civilization, which meant she needed to leave before someone investigated all of the noise she'd made. There wasn't any use in criticizing herself until she'd found somewhere safe again.

Much like all of her other mistakes, she'd guessed. There wasn't really anything Trinitite could do about them, except put them out of her mind and focus on the present. Using one of her rigging's tentacles, she wiped her face, clearing it again as she started to stumble out of the chaotic scene she'd created. She needed to eat, she needed to find shelter, and while she was out of her disguise, she guessed her paint-and-chip detail could use the time to take care of some corrosion that was starting to build on her hull.

The Abyssal waded into the thick undergrowth, transferring her cane from a hand to one of her tentacles and using it to clear the thickest branches in front of her. While she was moving, she could take care of one of those, at least. She reached into her hull, pulling a so-far unopened package of food and reading the label.

GHIRARDELLI CHOCOLATE SQUARES

...yeah, she could use some of that right now. It wasn't ice cream, but it would do.

Writing this got... delayed by current events, but I guess I got it out quick enough. I don't have much to say about this chapter that wasn't said in the chapter itself. Was pretty exited to write this, and contemplating simply tacking it to the end of last chapter, but in the end I'm pretty glad I let this be a chapter on it's own. I hope you 'enjoyed!'