USS Orinda

Eagle Union Orinda-Class Heavy Cruiser USS Orinda
But call me Orinda or just Rin for practical purposes, okay? The full introduction is a little much.  If I had to describe myself, I would say that shipgirl-self is light tan of skin, grey-eyed, dark red hair, like one of the overcast autumn days my namesake city is known for.  By default I dress in a fitted shirt and shorts, stockings mismatched in length, with a coat that billows behind me when I pick up significant speed.  ORINDA is printed down the hem of my coat, just in case anyone forgets my name.  What looks like shoes is actually part of my rigging and how I skate across the water so easily.  My main batteries are mounted over my shoulders, generally, with my torpedoes on my arms for ease of access.  Trying to tell you how tall I am, on the other hand, would be like trying to tell you where in the sky the sun is.  The answer would only be accurate for a limited time.  I range from a manageable five foot four to a substantially less cuddly twenty or so feet tall depending on whether I'm in battle or not, and if I am, am I trading punches with another ship or not.  Size is relative to situation.

Commissioned January, 1922. Laid down August, 1931.
That was my maiden voyage as a warship. Wisdom cubes were introduced some time after we ships ranging from World Wars I-II had put in some serious history with our crews and our now-legendary sorties...and occasionally legendary accidents, like the time HMS Glowworm couldn’t find her steering in time and rammed straight into KMS Admiral Hipper, forever giving Glowworm the reputation (and personality) for solving problems with a solid headbutt. Wisdom cubes gave us agency, made us more. Humanity had always had ships. Now we were shipgirls, girls and women to a point, sometimes able to blend with humanity, sometimes flying across the water with rigging deployed and guns blazing. And the whole damn war started over again, many thanks to the interference of the Sirens. They’re a little like shipgirls, except they have no souls and don’t answer to any authority but their own, constantly running experiments on shipgirls and humanity through alternate realities connected to my crazy native reality by things called Mirror Seas.

Mirror Seas are a lot like your Illogical Field, really. One minute you’re on a routine patrol and the next people from an alternate reality are landing on your head, or physics has suddenly changed all its rules. Maybe you end up talking to another version of yourself that has seen very different things or is a vastly different person. It reliably happens at least every two months, if not more often than that. Life in the Azur Lane is insane, and honestly the Illogical Field here on Teragaia probably makes a lot more sense. It can’t make any less.

Maybe if I’m talking about my personal history, though, I should go back to my date of commission. I was supposed to be unveiled as the USS Sacramento in 1917, but that… didn’t happen. The manufacturing of me was over-deadline and over-budget and the three project managers heading my production kept changing details suddenly mid-build with neither warning nor communication to each other. As it happens that isn’t a good way to run the building of a warship, if you were interested. My ship-self’s torpedo tubes and rear-mounted main gun batteries collide if any attempt is made to use them simultaneously, and using either after they snag results in the explosion of both. Wisdom cubes marked a sharp increase in my effectiveness as a heavy cruiser -- guns mounted over my shoulders, torpedoes on my arms, no more tangling issues. Now, with war brewing, the Eagle Union wasn’t in a position to turn down a heavy cruiser, even a mediocre build like, well, like I was, but neither were they going to grace me with a real heavy cruiser’s name. Heavy cruisers are named after state capitols. For me, they named me and my class (unique to me as the mistake never to be repeated) after the hometown of the lead project manager in charge of my design. Orinda. I became the Eagle Union Orinda-class heavy cruiser USS Orinda. My sailors called me Lady Rin with some consternated affection -- they got grudgingly fond of me as they sorted through my quirks. My boys figured out I was a good ship who would serve them well if they fought smarter.



My crew was the first faces I saw when I first became. I’m not quite sure I can describe what it’s like to be reborn so completely. Was I aware before? I can’t say that I was or wasn’t. Surely, I had existed long enough and with a colorful enough history and devoted enough crew to develop a soul and a personality of my own even before the wisdom cubes were introduced, projecting the essence of me into something that does a fair imitation of flesh-and-blood. But was I aware? I don’t know. I know I became exquisitely, painfully aware of everything when I...awoke? Was born? When shipgirl-me became real. I lived. I breathed. I had hands to reach out, skin that burned with unfamiliar sensations as the men I once carried safe in my lower decks put their hands on me, trying to comfort me in my moment of panic. I had a heart, and it pounded with all the ferocity of a battleship’s unrelenting shelling. Sight; color was an assault all its own. Oh, and learning how to smell. I enjoy it now, of course, but when it first hit me I had never smelled anything in my entire existence and I had no idea how to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’; it was all just ‘big’. Is that why human infants cry when they are born? The sudden onset of overwhelming sensation where none previously existed? If it is, I understand their distress. I cried too. I screamed. Eventually they calmed me down and explained what was going on, and there I had an advantage on infants: I could understand what was being said to me and process it rationally because I had been born an adult.

Naval ports began changing after that. The Navies of the world didn’t just need to house their sailors anymore, they needed to house their shipgirls too. House us, feed us, school us, turning ports into academic dorms, almost, where we would learn and socialize in between sorties and other assignments. And every port had to be multi-national in nature, because even in wartime, perhaps especially in wartime, it was inevitable that some Commander somewhere would capture or rebuild ships from ostensibly enemy nations. So every fleet is a Joint Fleet with every faction determined to show off and prove themselves superior in engineering -- tomfoolery, I say, we all have our moments of triumph and failure, respectively -- albeit the showboating (no pun intended, but it is appropriate) does give our interdimensional guests the opportunity to not only see us in action, but learn how to be us, because they usually get translated into shipgirls by the Mirror Seas and since they weren’t shipgirls before they got to the Lane, learning the ropes takes some intensive instruction.

I told you I’ve seen some crazy stuff. Teragaia isn’t going to be as much of an adjustment as you might think.



Speaking of Teragaia…
You might be wondering how I wandered away from Port and ended up here. I’ve been wondering the same thing, a little bit, although I think I have most of it figured out. It all started when Commander Heron (we call him Grey, informally, but when people are watching, it’s Commander Heron) assigned a group of us to a routine resource patrol. He had his main fleets dealing with the crazy shit, so a resource extraction should have been a forgettable experience for all involved. The other girls and I were on our way back when, of course, a Mirror Sea opened up -- that happens every so often -- and split the group. The Sakura Empire destroyers and Zeppy (pint-sized copy of sole Iron Blood aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin) vanished one way and the two Eagle Union carriers, USS Arlington and USS Valley Forge, and I got rather violently tossed another. This Mirror Sea ended about forty feet in the air above another sea, onto which we fell. The carriers landed with more grace than I did. I landed on my face. And to any shipgirl who isn’t a submarine, the surface of the ocean might as well be solid, so that left some bruises.

The ocean has never tasted like berries before. I’ve seen it turn funny colors, so bubblegum pink wasn’t entirely a surprise, but the berry taste I wiped from my mouth when I sorted myself upright was. The wind smelled of taffy. The clouds glittered like...well, like actual craft glitter.

And so many of the other boats and ships on the water were made of wood, fiberglass, not a single one of them with a wisdom cube or two in the keel to bring them to life. It struck me, at least, that we had not only left the Mirror Sea, we had left our entire reality. And there might not be going back.

Was this how our ‘guests’ felt falling into our reality?



Firepower and Special Abilities
9 × 8 in (200 mm)/55 caliber guns (3x3)
8 × 5 in (130 mm)/25 caliber anti-aircraft guns
2 × 3-pounder 47 mm (1.9 in) saluting guns
8 × caliber 0.50 in (13 mm) machine guns
2 × double 610 mm (24 in) torpedo tubes
Focused Assault -- 25% activation when firing the main gun to inflict double damage.
All Out Assault -- Every 7 shots from the main guns, triggers Full Barrage Orinda Class II
Lady Rin’s Patchwork Grin -- Increase this ship’s FPR, EVA, SPD, and AA by 1% per factionally unmatched piece of gear equipped.

That’s just the stuff that makes me look all scary if I have to show off. Ideally, nobody will have to see that part. They’ll just see this stuff:

Walking on Water -- It’s just something shipgirls do. We walk on water, we glide across it, sometimes it looks like we’re flying, our toes barely skimming the surface. Much of what we do is ugly because war is ugly, but we have made beauty in this.

Now You See It… -- Shipgirls have rigging. It’s how you can tell that we’re still ships, no matter how much like you we otherwise look. But it would be a royal pain in the aft if we had rigging all the time. How would we sleep? Change clothing? I’ll tell you a little secret: it folds in. Like how angels can hide their wings from the humans in all of the movies and television shows, we shipgirls can tuck our rigging away inside and just people around a bit for a while. Some of us even prefer to do that and deploy the rigging only when necessary. Interestingly, the rigging can also be taken off and set aside, for those who don’t know how to suck it in. Redeploying it actually will make it magically reappear on the shipgirl. Logical? No. But I don’t come from a logical world.

Skins -- A girl doesn’t want to look the same for every occasion! I have my standard skin, which is how I look normally, a few event and holiday skins to play around with, a slightly risque skin a daring Commander might buy in the shop for me, and the all-important oath skin, which I will wear if I ever find a new commander and he/she and I cultivate some kind of relationship that progresses to the point of a promise ring. I may even have a retrofit skin if I find a new Commander willing to invest the time and resources into retrofitting me. Most people just change clothes, but it’s a bit bigger of a process when you’re a ship and you have to include redressing your rigging and potentially dramatically reorienting your entire combat profile just to look cuter or dressier. Hence skins, equippable outfits where all of the reorientation has already been done. Grab-and-go. Logical? Again, no. Same reason.

Gear Skins! -- Have you ever been cluster-bombed by origami cranes or flying sandwiches? Ever been torpedoed by whiskey bottles or candy canes or tiny Eiffel Towers? Wars get depressing if you take them too seriously, so to lighten the mood, we shipgirls invented ways to insert levity, like making planes, torpedoes, and battleship cannon shells look any way we want. Seriously, a battleship salvo is terrifying under normal circumstances, but if the word FAKKYU! is flying across the sky at you, the incoming pain is at least a little hilarious. It’s also much less insulting (somehow) to get broadsided by whiskey or neckties or Eiffel Towers than it is by standard torpedoes. It just is. I have no rational explanation for why, although this is the last place I expect to need a rational explanation for anything. The carriers that got lost with me refuse to use these skins, but I’ve been known to change my torpedoes around to keep things interesting.

The Power Of Love -- It was inevitable that in turning ships into people, we would develop emotions and emotional attachments. Ordinarily a shipgirl only cultivates affinity towards her Commander, but I lack one, so I hope to develop friends in lieu of, and as this hopefully-mutual affinity grows, so will my combat abilities, bolstered by my will to fight for those I care for.

Two Places At Once -- You see me, shipgirl, merrily skating across the water or walking down the village paths. You also see the USS Orinda, heavy cruiser, docked in the harbor. They’re both me. I’m me and I’m also the ship. Apparently ship-self came with me when the Mirror Sea dumped us out of the Azur Lane and into Teragaia’s waters. You’ll also see that I’m dwarfed by two aircraft carriers. The stately one is USS Arlington. The weathered one that’s seen better days is USS Valley Forge. They’re as stuck in this strange duality as I am, able to feel everything that touches ship-self but unable to exert much control over ship-self beyond the most basic, rudimentary commands. We can open and close our doors, if we’re onboard, but we haven’t quite figured out how to steer. Ironic, given. We can’t steer ourselves. I will make myself home for now, however, and see where life takes me.