Chapter Thirteen: A Surprise Awakening (Edited)

In my defense, I waited a few minutes before wandering off.

I was well aware what I was doing wasn’t exactly the peak of caution and Mom would not be happy with me, but it was fine. I would be a liar if I said I knew everything about the ship, but I knew enough basics to probably keep myself out of trouble and I only intended to explore a few rooms away. Besides, there was a strangely enticing quality to the ship.

The ship was long empty, yet walking past bulkhead after bulkhead, beams of light from my lantern illuminating passing rooms in stark shadows made me feel as if I could hear echoes of the past. Here, I saw a mop carefully set aside and wedged between more piping so that it wouldn’t bang around on high seas or intense maneuvers when a crewman long ago had to suddenly leave but was still conscientious. There, a pile of tools like what Mom had carried in, notably more degraded than her own lying on the ground as if the sailor working here had to step away.

Scenes like this were all over the place. It was beyond clear the ship had been lived in, and up to the minute it was abandoned, work was being done until everyone just stepped away. Mom had only told pieces of the story and left me to pick up the fragments.

I wandered on, my steps echoing across the steel deck and across bulkheads. My lantern cut swathes of light through the dark, revealing more and more of the Sandcutter’s guts. More often than not, things were left in a mess, either from people’s sudden departure, leaking water and humidity damage, or something else, but given the current situation, I suppose it should have been far worse. For one, the place didn’t smell like absolute death. To be clear, it certainly didn’t smell good. This far in, the smell of mold in some places was more than present, but it felt far more muted, especially with the faint scent of oily magic I knew to be circulating about the ship now. I knew there were lots of things on board that, when combined with no maintenance and leaking water, should have made this place an active biohazard of pure rot to navigate in and—

I stopped. I really thought about biohazards for a second, and especially old timey construction that this ship vaguely reminded me of when it wasn’t doing magical stuff.  I promptly shuddered as I realized it was entirely possible a magical equivalent to asbestos was everywhere in here. It might have explained why everything was in as good a condition as it was, but it also might have given me a magic tumor. A few moments later I worked it out of my system as I reminded myself that I was living on an isolated island away from any society with my mother. I had bigger problems to worry about than future potential cancer.

Keeping an eye on overhead lines, I eventually found myself wandering into a helpfully labeled “Crew Quarters” by a utilitarian sign on a wall. I soon found myself at a moral quandary: right or left?

Deciding to take the ubiquitous rule of mazes and always going left, I chose to be a rebel and went right and promptly found myself in a break room of some sort.

The room before me wouldn’t have looked out of place as a lounge in my old world. A somewhat sparse lounge, admittedly, but I’d seen worse designated break rooms working retail in my old life. A central table dominated the room with surrounding chairs bolted to the deck.  Along the wall, some enterprising sailors had elected to make the room more “homey” by painting a fireplace along the wall, complete with an equally two-dimensional adjacent log pile. I traced my fingers along the still smooth paint before taking in the rest of the room.

While the furniture remained intact and in place, everything not bolted down clearly wasn’t. Remnants of a hastily abandoned card game were obvious to see with scattered cards and cups everywhere. Most of the cards were degraded heavily from moisture, but a few remained loosely legible. One portrayed a winged sun. Another card held a moon grasped by skeletal hands. Most of the other cards were illegible, but what little remained all seemed to depict great figures, landscapes, or the stars. How it was played, I had absolutely no idea. It could be something like Magic the Gathering, or it could be blackjack for all I knew.

I did wonder if Mom played this game and what she’d say if I showed her these cards I probably shouldn’t have. 

Glancing at the card as dust fell in the lantern's light, I let my mind wonder. I imagined late nights and bored sailors killing time before shuteye, betting anything from work details to wages they couldn’t even spend at sea.  I imagined conversations big and small, ranging from complaining about the night’s dinner, disputes over games and national past times, even talks about what books were in the ship’s limited library. Did they have comics, or did they prefer more nuanced literature? At the end of a long night when the ship was quiet and no one spoke above whispers unless they had to, I listened to what they missed from back home, who they wanted to see again, and what they’d do after service was over.

I calmly put the cards I was holding down and left the break room to its quiet solitude.

Glancing into the other room, I saw a long, thin area with just enough space for a grown man to walk through with built in cubbies for beds on the sides. Berths, I think they were called. It’d be cramped for an adult, but for me it was fine.

My nose scrunched up at the mildew smell coming from the room and its blue gray sheets but could tolerate it as long as I plugged my nose. Accommodation here seemed sparse, although in peak conditions I imagine the bedding was comfy enough. I idly glanced through the footlockers stationed periodically through the room, also bolted down, not expecting to find much. Most things had been cleared long before.

The first three lockers were a bust or just had old clothes in them, while the third had me flushing before I slammed it shut. That was not something a girl my age should be seeing. Some enterprising sailor had clearly had a talent for art and decided the interior of their locker was a great place to practice his or her promising future as a pornographic pinup artist. Stepping away as quickly as I could with an embarrassed flush, I couldn’t help noting that I now knew G-strings were a known commodity in this world.

Fortunately, the last locker was nowhere near as scandalous. I even lucked out with a fruit bar hidden beneath a technical manual titled "Technicalities of Quantized Mana Chromatics in Micro Scale Thaumic Workings Volume 6". I spent far longer than I like to admit just trying to decipher the complex characters of the title and gave up as there was even more in the subtitle. A glance inside revealed pages with words I understood by themselves, but when grouped together made about as much sense as my first time reading a calculus book in my old life.

To appease my frustration, I gobbled my fruit bar find on the spot. It wasn’t Magister Monty’s  Mint Drops but instead had a sweet raspberry filling that inexplicably popped with cinnamon that left me wanting more. Sadly, I found no more candy stashed anywhere.

Having explored the bit of crew quarters I returned to the entry area and promptly saw the hatch I used to get into this area shut.

I hadn’t heard a single thing.

I closed my eyes, and very deliberately took a breath. I opened them again and calmly tried the hatch wheel. It did not budge. When I put more force onto it, it still did not budge. The only thing that did happen was that I dislodged a very faint cloud of dark reddish dust that made me leap back as my heart clenched and ice climbed up my spine.

“Don’t panic,” I breathed out to myself. I knew Mom was on the ship. She would eventually notice I’d left, rip the ship apart to find me, and then never trust me alone again.

I decided yelling out as loud as I could was the best course of action as surely that would get Mom’s attention. Sadly, the only result of that action was my own ears folding as my own echo came back warped and scary sounding. I also realized that this ship may be full of hollow spaces, but many of the bulkheads in here were extremely sturdy to outright armored. I had no idea how well the sound would transmit.

With “Plan A” a failure, I elected to wait in place until Mom found me. At this point, my lantern flickered and died. I screamed. In this world, I saw better in low light, but low light did not mean I could do with no light. Whatever powered the Sandcutter’s lights was well and truly shut off or minimal enough in this area that I was entombed in shadows.

Trembling, I blindly reached for my pack and pulled out the second lantern I’d snuck in. I toggled it on, only for it to flicker and die. If anything, it felt as if the shadows thickened in outrage at my actions. I felt as if I was choking in the dark, like the shadows were constricting my chest.

I cannot say why the dark encapsulating me affected me as it did. I’d had moments in my old life when the power was out, where I was in a room totally cut off from the sun and artificial lighting. It hadn’t remotely affected me like this then. It felt less like I was in the dark and more like the dark was trying to sink into me, like if my attention wavered for a second something would grab and slither into my eyes.

I was, in a word, frantic.  Cold metal was beneath me, above me, on my cheek, to my sides, anywhere and everywhere as claustrophobia zeroed in on my mind.

I thought I kept hearing something in the dark, but it was always my own breathing, my own movements causing echoes. The frantic and primal part of me tried to find some visual reference but of course there was nothing no matter how hard I looked. Meanwhile, my rational mind kept coming back to how this couldn’t have just happened and that something had followed me here, something I’d accidentally called.

I tried in fits of rationality to look for glowing strips of paint overhead, to fiddle with my lanterns, to even scrape rough bits of metal to futilely create sparks, but every time I saw absolutely nothing. This prompted a greater feeling of something behind me and no matter what I did, no matter how I practically embedded myself into a bulkhead to make sure nothing could be there, I could not get rid of the feeling.

I cannot say when I truly opened my eyes again or had any form of rationality that wasn’t calling for my mom. All I know is that I blinked, and I saw once more.

A passage much like others I’d seen on the ship lay before me, and this one did have a faint glow. Yet, it wasn’t one from any of the light strips usually preferred, or the glowing paint meant to help sailors in the dark find their way. If anything, shadows had devoured the light sources I knew should be above.

 Instead, I saw feline paw prints etched in glowing gold leading into the passageway.

There were many horror scenarios that came to mind.  Heck, some of them were from the stories Mom told in this world, even if I knew she kept them mild. Stories of lost ships on high seas being rediscovered by curious children and facing mischievous ghosts with just a hint of danger to them. This wasn’t even to mention the ones mass produced to jaded audiences in my old world.

I knew it was a bad idea to follow them. I knew just as well I couldn’t handle the true dark, either. That feeling alone overrode everything else. Shivering and shaking, I followed the prints. When I looked back, I just saw an enclosing tomb of shadows visibly encroaching upon the prints of light and smothering them, bit by bit. I twisted and hurried to follow the light.

Much like before, I do not know how long I walked. My only goal was to follow the light and stay out of the cloying darkness. I clutched the lantern Mom had given to my chest like it was a lifeline and tried mostly in vain to stay calm. I didn’t look back again.

Then, the last paw print before me faded and I found an opened hatchway. Stepping in, my lantern flickered back to life with an odd hum and burst of oily magic that had my nostrils flare while my hand, no, my crest, itched.

I peeked in.

The room I saw seemed important. I saw charts lining the walls, a table dominated by an unfamiliar ocean with a central eastern landmass and associated islands. The good quality of the charts surprised me before I realized the room felt much drier than anywhere else on board, like the mysterious effect keeping out the rot was even stronger here. Chairs lined the walls with some form of complex equipment dotted with large crystals and copper runic spinners connected with wiring, to create unknown workstations and more. It screamed “command center”, although I wasn’t sure.

However, for all that I expected to see a captain charting a course through hostile waters here with his officers, that wasn’t what caught my attention. Rather, at the far corner of the room, almost in its own alcove like an altar, was a sphere.

It was large, nearly the size of a basketball, and looked to be made of a silvery metal crisscrossed with copper banding. Snaking all along the walls were more piping like what Mom had been working on that all connected to the sphere at various ports surrounded with yet more runes I didn’t know or understand. The sphere had a glass port that reminded me of those seen on old, bulky diving suits.

I was still utterly unnerved, if not quite terrified, but a spark of curiosity remained inside me and refused to listen to reason. So, I poked it.

At my touch, the murky, near opaque, glass view into the sphere shifted. Internal, cloud-like formations begin moving. They almost fell into distinct geometric states before just as rapidly shifting.  Gradually, a gentle, humming light began to fill the sphere, first from the core and moving outward. With its spread, the crystalline opacity changed in a wave of spreading amethyst. The formations again shifted in near comprehensible formations, yet every time I thought I had them pinned down in my mind they slipped away.

"Awakening procedure at 11% and climbing." A neutral, near mechanical voice spoke. "Please wait for the awakening procedures to finish."

I whirled and looked around with my ears twitching every which way until I realized the voice came from the sphere.

Curious, my ears perked to listen as I watched.

The glow built up, going through internal formation faster and faster until...

It yawned.

It took me ten seconds to process that. By that point, the voice had spoken up again with notably more emotion and a clearly feminine voice that made me think of a Lady for some reason.

"Awakening procedure finished, ICM Lady Sandra Spirit Core 2.22 is online and — oh sweet goddess what happened to my body? I can't feel everything, there's rust everywhere, and — and are those holes in my hull? Engineering, what is going on — oh my goddess, where is everyone, what is happening?" a youthful woman's voice spoke in a rapidly rising panic.

"Is my aft turret g—gone? I just had that fixed and-and—" the woman’s voice broke into sobs at that point.

I was left awkwardly standing there as someone I didn’t know or even know what she was sobbed. I eventually settled for patting the sphere.

That got a reaction. The light inside flared.

“What? Who’s there?” The voice said, but with a suddenly wary tone.

“Um…” I said, really not sure where this was going. “I’m Gwen?” I tried. I tried waving, and the light inside the sphere… narrowed in brightness?

“Hi Gwen, I’m afraid I can’t quite see you, some of my resonance points seem to be…gone,” she said. For a second I thought she was going to start crying again. “Let me see…” she trailed off.

The view port on the sphere seemed to narrow before suddenly what looked like an iris formed and stared at me. I gulped, backing away. The iris flared at me in almost what seemed like surprise before it focused once more.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to scare you, just I had to reactivate a very old function that I hadn’t had to use since…well, it doesn’t matter, just a long time and wait, are you a little girl?” the voice asked incredulously.

“Um…yes?” I said, not denying it. “I’m five. Who are you?” I asked, settling on being direct because I didn’t know what else I could even try. “I mean, I heard you waking up, but…”

“I suppose you did. Well, formal introductions, then? I am the spirit core of the ICM Lady Sandra, but you can call me Sandy, young lady.” With the way her voice sounded, so polite if somewhat wavering, I almost expected to hear rustling skirts and see her curtsy if she wasn’t an armored sphere mounted on a wall.

I nodded. That had a lot of implications, and this whole conversation did, really, but I needed to focus on the present.  “Okay Sandy, I’m Gwen,” I said once more, before realizing I did have a clan name now. “Gwen Mor,” I amended.

“Oh, Mor? Lieutenant Eliza didn’t have a child… I think? Anyway, I don’t think you’re supposed to be here, but, uh, I think a lot of things are a bit off right now. Do you know where your mommy and daddy are? I would very dearly like to speak with them, or some of the crew, if that’s possible,” Sandy spoke.

“I don’t know my daddy,” I said, honestly. I had never met him in this life. “I got separated from Mama earlier and ended up here by accident. I don’t think the crew have been here in years.”

Accident was one way to put it, but I’d just met Sandy. I didn’t need to tell someone I didn’t know about my experience in the dark. 

“Oh,” was all Sandy could say.

“What… what are you?” I finally asked.

This made the eye in the porthole widen. “Well, I’m the spirit core of the ship? I already told you this.”

“But what does that mean?” I pressed.

The eye seemed to focus on me once more. “Oh,” she said in surprise. “You’re younger than I thought.  It might help to think of me as the ship itself. Where the ship goes, I go. When the ship turns, I turn. I served in her majesty’s grand fleet and… well, did a lot of important grownup stuff,” she amended. 

“Oh, what about—” I began, only to be interrupted.

“Gweeeeen!” I shrieked as a warm body swept me up, only to immediately relax as I recognized Mom.  She rained kisses upon my forehead and nuzzled close, wrapping both arms tightly around me in an iron hold. “Where did you go? I finished up and you were just gone, and—”

I did nothing to stop her. If anything I leaned in to hug her. Everything about Mom comforted me from her touch to her smell and I couldn’t help shaking a bit. I didn’t trust myself to speak, not now, and not after what I’d seen. I think Mom noticed my shaking but kept me close and stroked my hair.

Eventually, Sandy’s voice hesitantly spoke up. “Lieutenant Mor? Is that you? What — what is going on here? Where is Captain Cutters? Where is everyone and why am I so damaged? Please tell me just what happened while I was asleep?” she asked, her voice warbling.

Mom stiffened. “Sandy,” she whispered. “That’s a very long story,” she said. “I promise, I’ll tell you everything as soon as I can, but I have to see to my daughter right now. For now, you need to preserve power. The mana reactor is offline, and battery power is irreplaceable right now.”

“I see,” Sandy said, shaken. “When will we be able to talk?” she asked.

“Soon, just…not now.” Mom said.

“Okay…I’ll set myself to standby mode, then.” Sandy said quietly. “Please don’t forget me,” she said.

“I promise, I would never forget. You have my word.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Mor,” Sandy said. “I will see you soon, then.”

With that, the light on Sandy’s core dimmed to almost nothing. The amethyst interior faded back to crystal opacity barring a tiny dot of purple in the center.

Mom flicked her hair back and let out a long breath. She’d never stopped petting my hair.

“Mom? Who was that?” I trailed off. I didn’t even know what to say at this point. My brain felt like mush and I think I just wanted to sleep and be held.

“Sandy is a friend, Kitten. I don’t know how she activated or what you were doing here,” she said with a curious look, “But… I think Sandy just being awake makes it possible for us to finally get off this rock,” Mom said.

With that, she let me down and held out her hand. “Come, Gwen, I think this day has been long enough for both of us. Let's go home,” she said.

I didn’t hesitate to take her hand and step back into the darkened depths of the ship. I tried to ignore the ways the shadows felt, but they seemed inexplicably different now, more physical than I remember.

Later, after we both had a chance to calm down, I told Mom everything. I told how I wandered off, how the hatch closed, my time in the dark, and the cat prints that guided me to Sandy. It would have been so easy to bury it; to pretend I was just imagining things. I thought Mom would doubt me; think I’d just goofed off. Instead, she simply said, “Oh Gwen,” and hugged me tight.

There could have been much more said, but that was all that was needed.

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Chapter Thirteen: Author’s Note

Fun fact: This chapter and the past few really held up my writing for a bit back when I was first writing this.

I think what actually held me up the most was describing the Sandcutter’s interior and how Gwen  even got to Sandy.   I ended up talking with someone with actual experience onboard ships and how they can feel “lived in” before I was able to really get this down.

Also, if Gwen didn’t have a fear of the dark prior to this chapter, she sure does now.

Until next time.

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