What are you doing, Oenone? Why commit seeds to sand?

Centaur wasn't exactly sure what motherhood was supposed to be like. She was eager to learn about many things– and was called upon to teach many more– but motherhood was a particularly human mystery.

By one measure, she had none but her hull, but that ignored the cube. The hull provided much material, that was inarguable, and it provided a concrete thing for man's imagination to center on, but the shipgirl sprung from the cube.

She, like all her sisters and her elders, sprang from the union of cube and cognition. Human perspective, usually from captains, and cubes, all from shipgirls considering that the initial stock of Siren-provided ones had run dry. They were, if not fully self-sustaining, a parasite that had hitched itself onto humanity very tidily. Unless every shipgirl perished or the need for warships disappeared, they would perpetuate themselves.

Centaur found the idea rather humbling. She felt young to begin with, but as time passed more and more shipgirls would be her juniors. A third, a half, creeping up and up and up.

It was easier to think of herself as someone who still had to learn instead of someone who was a prime candidate to become a teacher. A leader. An example. Of course, she was glad to have them as friends and companions, but there was a growing expectation she be a leader to them, one of the most experienced shipgirls in the whole Harwich Force.

And with experience, especially hands-on, practical combat experience, came cubes. Great quantities of them, enough to give the breath of life to some of her fellow cruisers while also sending two to Japan.

That was what got her thinking about the matter in grander terms. Several of her comrades were only here because of her, and not in the sense that she had saved their lives from peril. She had provided the material that made them. Thinking of those dreadfully embarrassing biology classes she had been forced to take (to avoid any impropriety)...

Was she not something like their mother?

Well, that felt quite bold to say. And the metaphor was really quite silly as well if you put some thought into it! There was the matter of it being something like parts brought together. The conception of the man, the ship proper, and the cube. The ship wasn't truly necessary to sustain a shipgirl, so perhaps you could really stretch things and call it a womb… that left either cube or conception as sperm and the other as ova.

If you said the ova came from the woman and sperm from the man, that made the cubes ova? But there was no reason that a woman with sufficient connection to the ship could be utilized… Oh, this metaphor was going nowhere quite rapidly!

Still, it was a strange thought, that she was the dam of several of her comrades. Perhaps some unflattering comparison involving centaurs and the word broodmare…

Ahem! Back to her quasi-children. Cube-daughters? That seemed a strange term. She didn't get to see many of them, unfortunately. While there was a definite place for the cubed cruiser in modern naval warfare, many of the cubes she fought to earn went straight to the Grand Fleet. Investing cubes to make more cubes was all well and good unless you really needed cubes.

Battleships were lavished with that sort of attention, although one of her cubes went to a member of her own class: the recently finished Cassandra.

Pictures had to be snuck to her, but Centaur commanded enough respect around Harwich to get her hands on some hush-hush Grand Fleet info.

The girl was short and the shoulders were perhaps a bit broad, but Centaur thought that served to make her look unique. Lovely auburn hair with these perfect natural curls that framed dark, intense eyes…

All of it wrapped up in a maid's uniform. A long skirt and apron covered her down to the toes of tidily polished boots, a notepad peeking out of one pocket, all very professional. That wouldn't have been the craziest uniform one of them came into being with– in fact, it was up there as most modest– but it appeared the girl had a personality problem.

Some of the blame hit the man who imagined her, but part hit Centaur. Had she produced a flawed cube? Was that something you could do? Had they sent faulty material to Japan?

Admittedly, when Centaur had been given the full details, she couldn't help but feel the blame was somewhere in the Admiralty. In fact, she almost felt tempered to march down there and ask if someone had done something to her child.

(She hadn't been sure initially. She wouldn't claim as such for a Japanese battleship, but her fellow C-Class, that poor girl… she was Centaur's child. If the girl didn't mind, of course.)

The shock of shipgirls as a whole had worn off, for the most part. They were integrated into the Grand Fleet with remarkable swiftness, becoming one of the officer's most important tools. However, they were women as much as, if not more than they were tools of war.

Taking tea on the battleship Queen Elizabeth was a very different thing from taking tea with her, for example. She certainly wasn't the worst woman he had ever shared a table with, and she had a good eye for appearances and how she might be perceived. It would be hard not to be a little self-aware (perhaps too much so) after her stunt at Jutland. For good or ill, every ship girl who followed her would chart their courses by her example.

Perhaps this was Beatty's own influence coloring her, but she was excited to be introduced to the public. Oh, he had no doubt she'd be facing some issues of her own when it came to winning the public, but there was something about shipgirls. Something that was at times disturbing and almost revolutionary, but something that was also magnetic. They were not something you could just ignore.

(Considering the way the men reacted to shipgirls like Repulse and Lion, it seemed like the opposite of being ignored was the real problem.)

Society would have to deal with them somehow. The thought of them being turned straight into the same British nobility he already knew was… a little painful, but he supposed they'd still be more like warriors than tittering hosts of parties. Well, Tiger could do both, but there was an unmistakable edge to most of the battleships.

Some of the girls seemed almost purpose-built to jump into civilian life or even seemed like they had been plucked out of normal life wholesale. Beatty supposed he never thought he'd see a warship as a girl, but to add to that, he never thought he'd seen a warship that was conflict-averse.

And yet… Cassandra.

She sprung into the world wearing a maid's uniform, which was a bit odd already. Many of the girls wore unique outfits (do not read that unique as necessarily positive) that usually hinted at high status. While not regulation, they typically implied uniforms strongly.

But a maid's uniform was a very different thing from an officer's uniform, and that was highlighted by a different personality. Cassandra was hesitant. Shrinking. Dumb, in the literal sense of not speaking.

That led to awkward questions. Eccentricities could be accepted– that was practically the Grand Fleet's slogan at this point– but an unwillingness or literal inability to speak was a crippling impediment. Considering that so much of a shipgirl's utility was gathering information in one place (her mind), not being able to share that information was more crippling than a missing limb.

There had been checks of the ship's telephones and voice pipes, to make sure the issue wasn't from there. Nothing. It wasn't the Sopwith Pup she could launch either. Her captain, Davies, was in no way opposed to shipgirls, considering his previous work with Tiger.

It really seemed as if Cassandra had sprung into the world dumb and terrified. Because when it rained, it poured. Maybe it was fitting that a light cruiser ended up jumpy and hypersensitive, but that wasn't a good thing in non-combat contexts. She'd look at officers or captains and her eyes would suddenly mist with tears.

(That had led to some very awkward questioning at first, but there was no evidence of any offense committed against her.

Elizabeth felt protective of the girl. Perhaps it was some of her royal namesake shining through, a protector of her lessers. Or perhaps she just liked the thought of having someone who would pour her tea and listen to her talk without complaint.

"Cassandra, if you would?"

The ship in question came forward and quietly poured the battleship some more tea. She stayed calm, her hands not so much as trembling as she served, but when she retreated from the table… Beatty couldn't help but think the girl looked terribly anxious. She always did.

Despite being built in England just like her sisters, Malaya couldn't help but feel that she was a sojourner in a foreign land. It wasn't just the fact that her complexion was quite different from the usual for England, it was the country… or perhaps the world as a whole. Every man that sailed aboard her was at home in Britain, because Britain was their home, and despite it being the very land of her birth, it had the character of a foreign country to her.

Valiant and Elizabeth settled into the military administration with relative ease while Malaya was still stumbling on the shore, trying to get some idea of the measure and bounds of this alien country. When Malaya crept into the base's library for the first time, it was as if she had pried the Rosetta Stone from the foundations of Fort Julien. Unfortunately, her little Institut d'Angleterre was only staffed by herself.

Unlike an Egyptologist, Malaya didn't have to dig up artifacts and plumb the depths of ancient tombs to find her evidence. All she had to do was ask for leave and suddenly she was in the thick of it. In Britain. If she wanted to know how the great rulers of Britain had erected their monuments on the banks of the ancient Thames, all she had to do was ask.

Perhaps that was a silly way of looking at it. She was a scientist and the subject of her studies were… Tom, Dick, and Harry down at the local pub. Of course that sounded absurd, but wasn't her situation absurd?

She couldn't just take England (and Scotland and Wales and Ireland) for granted. That was sort of why she sympathized so strongly with girls who dropped into this world to find it suddenly opposed to them, or just passively hostile.

Repulse ruffled some feathers, New Zealand shared Malaya's issues with not looking English, Renown struggled with social niceties… and of course, Lizbet's Cassandra.

Malaya wondered about the maid thing, of course. Perhaps her captain saw Cassandra as a tool that served a purpose or an assistant in his pursuits above all else… Lizbet just happened to be there to seize upon those urges. Malaya supposed it was technically better that quiet, shrinking Cassandra served under a powerful woman and fellow shipgirl, as opposed to anyone else. Even shipgirls who followed the Admiralty's orders to the letter recognized them as fundamentally apart.

It was a good idea, in some ways. Malaya tried to keep an eye out for anyone who might need her help, but sometimes she wondered if Lizbet was forming a camp around herself. Maybe that wasn't very generous, but Cassandra was a very able maid and proved a terror at sea, in spite of her dumbness. Even among shipgirls, she was an unbelievably swift telegrapher, although that grew a little vexing considering how short her messages were.

(If she ever had more than a dozen words to say, she would have been one hell of a chatter mouth. Chatter… Morse?)

Cassandra was a good girl, but she was also a dedicated people pleaser to her own detriment. Long hours helping Warspite tend to Lizbet, helping in the kitchens or laundry, pouring drinks during Lizbet's little get-togethers… the girl never seemed to stop, even when another person might have excused themselves.

The Queen Elizabeth class had gotten into an argument at one of Lizbet's dinners– Valiant and the greenboy shells– and it got uncomfortably personal. Cassandra watched through every second of that sibling drama, mute as always, shaking like a leaf. It might have been a glance at her that urged Malaya to extricate herself before it got too bad…

But after that point, she wasn't quite as generous when it came to her view of the Lizzie-Cassandra relation.

Alongside Warspite, Cassandra was one of Lizbet's most loyal attendants. Malaya wondered if Cassandra was a little biographer in the making, ready to write some great accounting of Lizbet's career up close and personal like Meneval did for Napoleon. Le petit super-dreadnaught?

Well, Malaya supposed they were in the middle of making that history still. She tried to keep her own records of how things went, for the same of whatever historians would follow her.

Mute, kind, and intelligent seemed like a lacking descriptor of Cassandra, but Malaya supposed catching every aspect of a person was impossible. They wouldn't know the way Napoleon chatted with comrades while learning war in school or the jokes Nelson made a few drinks in.

Still, Malaya would try to record those little kindnesses of Cassandra's. She seemed so terribly desperate to please Barham and Malaya, like she was trying to mend fences where Lizbet wouldn't, probably not on her orders. Malaya thought it unfortunate that the poor girl had basically consigned herself to the role of being a maid just because that was the uniform she wore when she first came into being…

Malaya thought there was something remarkable about shipgirls, the way they could change where cold, unrelenting steel couldn't.

Where are you going? You will bring conflagration back with you. How great the flames are that you are seeking over these waters, you do not know.

-The seeress Cassandra, speaking to Paris