But this cannot go on to infinity,

because then there would be no first mover,

and consequently, no other mover;

seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch

as they are put in motion by the first mover;

as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand.

therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover,

put in motion by no other;

and this everyone understands to be…

Things did not just appear ex nihilo. That was simple scientific fact. Men of antiquity might have thought that maggots sprung from rotting flash or oysters came from the silt, but modern science outgrew those ancient hypotheses. Things had causes, even if they were unintuitive or hidden from the eyes.

She was a thing, by that measure. A long chain of cause and effect had led to her construction, to the formation of the ore that was smelted and processed to become her hull. Provence, ship of the French Commune, sprung from a need for battleship power to counter the reactionaries. On a grander scale, cause and effect formed the state that formed her. The rise of the Commune could be described through the lens of historical materialism: the inherent contradiction of what the bourgeoisie and proletarians wanted from a system boiled over in a worker's revolution. The Commune was an advance in the worker's condition borne from the chaos of the Weltkrieg…

To divorce yourself from historical context was to attempt to cut off your own legs so you wouldn't have to stand on the ground. It was an impossibility. They recognized what came before but constantly built up towards something better: Provence's not-sacred duty (or rather, she couldn't call it her sacred duty in public, given laïcité) was the protection of the communes before the completion of worldwide revolution.

A bright future waited for her, but again and again, she found herself drawn to the past. Part of it was a grander belief in something more than state-enforced secularism, but in addition to asking about her purpose and where she came from on a grand, theological level, she had to wonder about that question when it came to shipgirls as a… class. Species. Whatever they were. They were made for war, yes, but where did they come from?

Cubes, you might say. Yes, that was true. Provence had already given the breath of life to several of her comrades, and she was intimately aware of the process. She knew that cubes, like life, did not spring from nowhere. Perhaps there was some exceptional, almost miraclous accident of probability that had brought life to primeval earth and a second that brought cubes to the navies of the Germans and British, but didn't the latter seem a little much?

Even with cubes to study and research, they had never succeeded in making an artificial one. Were they supposed to assume that Britian and Germany each produced two tidy batches of five through some unknown means before never doing so again? It didn't make sense.

Provence knew that her lineage stretched back to HMS Valiant. Imperial stooge she may have been, but she was also Provence's foremother, a sort of… Eve who begat every French ship that had come to be. Or perhaps that was a little too far up the chain. Think of those great old testament figures who sired nations, but instead of forming them, ships such as the Queen Elizabeths armed nations.

She would admit that she didn't possess many skills outside of fighting – which wasn't promising for her prospects when capital was finally vanquished and she was forced to make something of herself, if she lived to see it – but she did have a brain that could process basic cause and effect, even if some social graces escaped her. The cubes had to come from somewhere. This wasn't an absurd position to take, was it? There had to be some source for the cubes, or she wouldn't exist. She did, QED something was afoot.

Part of it was just fog of war, she would admit. If Britain and Germany had discovered some incredible power that gave them a military advantage, it was only logical that they kept it secret. Even if they were willing to share, the Germans and the exiles in Canada would never give it up to communards.

And yes, she was aware that she wasn't owed an answer. When primeval men stood upon the sun-beaten veldt, did they receive any answer? Perhaps some vague hints of divine revelation, if you believed in such a thing, but it was certainly possible she could grope around for answers and never find a single thing of note. How had the cosmos formed? How had life come to be?

(Funnily enough, a Belgian priest had recently proposed a theory that refuted the steady state theory of the universe. It wasn't very popular among Syndicalist scientists – something about forcing a beginning onto the universe. The steady state belief required matter coming into being, though, so… perhaps it grew too complex for a simple warship such as her. Predicting shells was easier math, if less satsifying metaphysically.)

Perhaps she wouldn't get an answer. In the same way that they couldn't exactly send a chap back to figure out what happend egons upon eons ago, they couldn't track down the exact moment that the British and Germany got their hands on cubes. Sure, they knew when they utilized the cubes, and it could be assumed they weren't hiding them in their back pockets for too long…

However, there were people she could attempt to ask, even if she couldn't insert herself into the very room where it had happened. There was a Third International shipgirl's conference coming up, and Malaya would be in attendance. She was about as close to a witness as she could reasonably get… Provence just had to hope that Birch would be doing more of the leadership work. She wasn't quite sure how the Union of Britain's girls chose to organize themselves, but Malaya, Birch, and Barham were some of the more important ones.

Maybe all she needed to do to satisfy her curiosity was interrupt some critical conversation between Malaya and someone important. Oh, joy.

There was laughter, there was music, there were officers who were very interested in speaking with her for some reason… the conference was more like a party, and Provence had a bit of a hard time with parties. She had some idea of how to lead a unit into battle, how to assign men to do certain tasks, but this was every man (and woman) for themselves.

Looking one way, she could see Nelson, Tiberius, and her own sister Lorraine discussing something at one of the tables. They seemed to be several glasses in already and looked rather glad to have cut themselves off from the rest of the party. Unfortunately, Provence did not have that luxury quite yet.

Fortunately, when the time came, Malaya was mostly on her lonesome. Sure, Barham was there, but she was another source who was remarkably close to the incident. They stopped whatever conversation they were having as she approached. "Hullo, Provence! Sit down."

She did. "Good evening Malaya, Barham. There's something I wanted to ask you."

Malaya shared the briefest look with her sister. "Ask away."

"What do you know about where your cubes came from?"

She took a swig of her drink. Provence wasn't sure how that would help, considering it didn't look very alcoholic, but maybe she just needed an excuse to think for a moment longer. Malaya sighed. "We get this a lot."

"I apologize. If you might excuse me–"

"I didn't say leave," Malaya said. "I'm just pretty sure I won't have what you're looking for."

"I want to know everything."

Malaya smiled. "It started, we think, sometime in April of 1916. The admirals wouldn't give us specifics about the cubes, but the process didn't start before April. Most of the initial ones were in May, even."

So mankind entered a new era of naval warfare just shy of two decades ago. Hmm.

"We think there was a delay after Elizabeth," Barham said, somehow managing not to betray any emotion when speaking the name of her sister. She did drop the 'Queen', though. "Part of it was Elizabeth proving herself. Part of it was the realization that cubes weren't good for anything else."

That was interesting. They didn't know exactly what cubes could do from the get go. Well, they didn't understand them fully even now, but cubes only interacting with ships was well established fact that this point. They knew it well enough to cube Elizabeth, but to not follow up on her sisters immediately?

Perhaps it was just a matter of throwing them at everything and seeing where it stuck, and they just got lucky with Elizabeth initially. It was possible… "What other uses were they looking for?" Provence asked.

"Mostly military hardware," Malaya said. "I mean, there was a war going on."

Again, she got the impression that the Wisdom Cube wasn't something man could understand. Why, you'd almost think the Cubes fell from heaven and the Admirals just chanced upon them. It almost made her think of a fetish or an idol, some object that gave success in battle… but cubes were inarguably real. No dead idols of cold metal here.

"Is there anything else?" Provence asked.

"Only one thing. But it's not going to help." Malaya said.

"Tell me."

"The Germans got theirs at the same time, if the spies are telling true. Tail end of April, beginning of May."

"But…." how? That was too much of a coincidence! Both powers getting wisdom cubes from nowhere at the exact same time was just too strange. "How many?" Provence asked.

Malaya hesitated, breathing out between clenched teeth before finally giving an answer. "Five each. Exactly five."

The same time, the same amount, a mysterious source… disregarding the conundrum of the American cubes (another mystery she wanted to look into right there) one strange thought came to mind. One horrifying thought: "A fair game." Provence whispered.

While the Germans and the British were working with different fleets – different battleships with different calibers and engines and all that – they had been given the same amount of materiel when it came to cubes. Sixteen pieces to a side on a chessboard, five cubes to a side on the North Sea. British cubes and German cubes worked the same way, it was a question of how they were applied and where.

It was some perverse reflection of a war game. Little blocks representing battalions and combat results tables were replaced with breathing men and the real, messy impact of shells on hulls and shockwaves on bodies. Real life was real life… and real life was unfair. Wisdom Cubes were nothing like any natural resource she could think of, but they certainly weren't evenly distributed across the world.

One almost got the feeling that both sides had been given the same stock to start with and then left to it… like some strange test of fitness. If it was a test, Provence supposed that the Germans succeeded. Despite the odds against them, they had seized victory; although Provence hoped that they had also planted the seeds that would grow into their own destruction.

Unfortunately, Provence was keen enough to realize that her line of questioning had soured the mood at the table. "I need a drink." Barham sighed.

How I imagine this French situation panning out: initially, I thought Provence was a new ship, built for the Commune. It isn't. I'm not sure if I'm thinking Provence was explicitly cubed post-revolution here or just got with the programme super quick, but either way I imagine France is dealing with a different cubing situation than the other powers. They've go less time from initial cube recieving to civil war, even assuming Britain throws them a bone a few months post-jutland

Epigraph is straw borrowed from an ox :)

Chosing Marsellaise as Provence was mostly based on the city the song was named after being in Provence. I was considering making this chapter about Alsace as Lorraine… but I'm genuinely unsure if I can take her personality seriously