Day 1

Captain's log, don't know which year. And this is how far I can take the Star Trek reference because I only watched like three movies. I am not boldly going anywhere either, at least not anytime soon.

How to start? This is my personal log, so I kind of doubt anyone else will ever read it. If you just found this in my corpse, well, I guess congratulations? If you killed me and took it out of my captain's quarters, fuck you.

Anyway, to summarise my current situation: I used to be a human until I woke up on some deserted island for some reason. Do not ask me why, I do not know. All I know is that I am not human anymore. Or a man. Being perfectly honest, the last part bothers me a lot more than the first. Being an Abyssal is not that different, although the dysphoria may just drown it out.

I guess that makes me transgender now. As much power as I wish them, I really did not need to experience their struggles firsthand. I spent the last two weeks trying to come to terms with this, but I still feel wrong in my own body. The tits do not help that when each one is almost the size of my head. I can not ask my crew to take them off, either; for some reason some genius decided that each part of the female form represents an important feature of warships on a shipgirl. Which is what I am now, kind of.

So when I said I am an Abyssal and not human anymore, that is what I meant. Funny how that used to be fictional where I am from, not that I know too much about the setting; I guess I need to learn as I go.

From what I figured out so far, the Abyss calls forth memories and ideas of ships that were meant to be but never lived. On top of that, it answers the calls of those who died unfair or honourless deaths and lets them rise again to take revenge on humanity for abandoning or scuttling them. Most actually existing ships come back on humanity's side, though. So just about as I remember it.

Nobody told me that here, by the by. Abyssals get racial memories or something like that, where you just know something the moment you wonder about it.

What I do not know is what the Abyss is or where it came from. I find it a little suspicious how quiet my instincts are on that; maybe it is self-aware. But there is little I can do about it right now.

Truth be told, I am bored. That is why I make this log to begin with: I have little else to do while my research runs through. The first two weeks I took long walks around the island. Tried to get used to my new center of gravity and being fuck-huge tall. And the dysphoria, but that is a work-in-progress. I still want to deck whoever decided it must be shipgirls instead of shippeople. Damn perverts.

Thinking about it, this should be the last time I bring it up. Reminding myself of it will only be upsetting and I doubt I want to read through my own ravings on it later. So this one's for you, future me.

Back to the matter at hand, there is little to do on this island. It has a nice size and my sensors found ore deposits toward the center, but I have little else. No hidden treasures, no ships, not even interesting animals. No other Abyssals, either. I am alone here with my thoughts; it was nice enough for the first two weeks, but I will probably go insane if I do not keep myself busy. Assuming that is still a thing for Abyssals, of course.

I can not really sally out, though. You see, while shipgirls conform to existing ship types, Abyssals have a thing called Installations. There is a bunch of them but they are all mostly groundbound; they can take to the waves, but it takes a lot of fuel to move them and most can not defend themselves from raiders. Like me. I have no weapons installed.

Then again I think I am happy about that for now. I do not want to go into firefights, so what I got works much better with my preference to bunker down. It is also a cheat skill to end all cheat skills in a world that approaches the non-magical, assuming the Abyssals and shipgirls are the only thing science can not explain.

I am a resource generation platform.

I just wondered if there are others like me, but the Abyss says no. Apparently I am unique, which is probably why humanity still stands. Only I can create resources, any resources, ex nihilo. My stores are gigantic and constantly fill up, even if just by a trickle. They will continue to do so for as long as I live. Steel, gunpowder, rare metals for electronics, fluids and gases. You name it, I have it. The entire periodic table, including stuff like Uranium. Wait.

Apparently my tech-tree does have nukes buried somewhere deep down. I need to go over it more carefully. But yeah, I got that too. It feels a bit like an RTS-game, making factories and improving my techbase while attacking the enemy.

Only there is no enemy around right now and I have a constant influx of resources. So I can follow my favourite strategy: teching everything out before doing anything else. Well, maybe not everything, I may want to do stuff before the next decade or two. Or more. There is a lot more to that tech-tree than I thought. But the point stands, I will hunker down here and build a base. If I am lucky, nobody will find it and I can just keep doing that. It may sound boring, but I like being at home... and I do not have a home right now, so I should probably make one. I am sitting at the beach writing this while some of my initial techs go through. You know, the basic stuff: lesser Abyss spawner blueprint, the first package of research speed enhancement, and enhanced armour plating.

Now that I think about it, this may be what the Abyss wants from me: to improve its techbase and spread this tech around so they can roll over humanity. It definitely gave me the right tools to make me do that, at least. I am just not sure if I want humanity to go extinct. The Internet would be nice to have.

...

Ah. There was the racial memories again. Maybe it is more like a direct line to the Abyss, though? Either way, I felt some odd urge to extinguish humans just now. As if in response to my thinking I would rather have them alive. A little surprising that I noticed it, but those thoughts feel kind of odd. A bit like my calls of the void; you know those moments of intrusive thoughts, like when you stand at a ledge and wonder for split-second if you should jump? Or drive your car into oncoming traffic? Like that.

Thinking about it a little more though, I may not be a shipgirl, but I am an Abyssal. A unique Abyssal that can eventually build nukes among other, more esoteric stuff. If they ever find out, they will stop at nothing to destroy me. Sympathetic or not. That is... honestly a good argument to side with the Abyss.

If you are a human reading this, then sorry about that. I do want to live, too. Guess that makes me your enemy by nature. I will need to think about it some more and try to check this is not the Abyss goading me.

But this should be enough for a first entry. I am stuck like this anyway and there is little else of interest happening right now. Maybe I take a small dip before finding a good spot to dig down.

Well... yeah. Those of you familiar with my past projects may notice that this is nothing like my usual fare. I do not write, read, or even look at SIs normally, much as I do with basically anything written in first person. When talking with friends on Discord about it, I could trace that back to my very first pieces of creative writing from over a decade ago. They were bad. Really bad. So bad I still cringe today when thinking back at them.

Then someone jokingly suggested I should write one of these as a way to 'work through the trauma'. Somehow that stuck with me and I figured I might as well. If nothing else, it will serve as a decent writing exercise. I am not deep in Kantai Collection, so expect some freestyling with what lore or metaphysics there may be.