Character sheet for Waking Up As A Spaceship. The series has been on hiatus since December of 2020, so beware Late Arrival Spoilers.
Main Characters:
Abyssal
God, why did you start my new life in hard mode? Couldn't you have at least gotten me a functioning ship?!
The protagonist. She has memories of being a man from modern earth who always dreamed of exploring space, but finds actually being in space doesn't quite match the hype.- Angst Coma: When her first mate Kuon posits the legit theory that her "I was reincarnated into a spaceship" memories might be faked and that she's the split personality while the hidden "Abby" is the real one, she goes completely unresponsive, eyes darting about in random directions, and her consciousness shuts down for a while.
- The Assimilator: Downplayed. Like all other Living Cores, she can assimilate tech but she can't just go around grabbing stuff willy-nilly. It either needs to be completely abandoned, given to her willingly, or she has to be able to overpower whoever already controls it. The last part is quite difficult on most occasions.
- Benevolent Boss: She rules her crew with a fair and even hand, caring at least as much for their welfare as her own.
- Blithe Spirit: Her only life goal is to explore space purely for the thrill of it and to try to find her ship's niche in the galaxy. She otherwise just travels to and fro where her whims take her, or the plot drags her kicking and screaming.
- The Chew Toy: Life as a Living Core has given her two polar extremes when it comes to social contact, either none at all or pretty much everybody firing upon her. Even her crew bickers and volleys insults. Heck, even her split personality Abby is snarky and full of sass.
- Crazy Enough to Work: When she answers a distress call, Kuon points out that the SOS could be faked. Abyssal replies that in the unlikely event the call is faked, they can pretend their ship is just a derelict and then ambush the pirates from within. Kuon lampshades that the plan is indeed stupid, but still feasible. Sure enough, it works like a charm when pirates respond to the distress signal.
- Cuteness Proximity: She has a tendency to go gaga over Kuon's maid avatar, even making statues and figurines of it. This utterly confuses Kuon, who genuinely doesn't understand what's so special about herself.
- Ditzy Genius: Justified. She's not stupid, just slow, because she simply doesn't have enough power from her ship generator to go above 0.8% of her computational ability for extended periods of time, making her a total airhead. She actually is deceptively clever, creative, and cunning. Her plans have an astounding rate of success as a result, and she's on record going from a bulky frigate, to an oversized corvette, to a respectable destroyer in less than a week, without a shipyard or dry-dock, something her "better" cores could only marvel at.
- Dumbass Has a Point: She's ditzy and slow, not stupid. So when Kuon states the distress call they are answering could be a pirate trap, Abyssal points out how counter-productive such a ploy would be in the vastness of space, spending insane amount of time and energy on a ploy that would be extremely unlikely to work, at best.
- Endearingly Dorky: At best her sanity rating is at 30%, so she's goofy, talks to herself, is quite ditzy because her computational ability is capped at 0.8%, but her crew loves her because she's very sympathetic to their plight and tolerates their constant bickering without playing favorites.
- Everybody Has Standards: She didn't exactly have a good impression of the Dawning Star faction, thanks to her first meeting with Jinko being an ambush, but when she saw that Yoake was about to be blasted by Sensenmann's corrosion torpedoes, she comes to the rescue, firing on Sensenmann because she doesn't want anybody to go through that.
- Kleptomaniac Hero: Justified. She uses her assimilation powers to steal tech whenever she can get away with it, because it's imperative to her survival to do so.
- The Leader: Of the charismatic type. She captains the ship, not because she is the ship, but because she listens to her crew and takes in all opinions, whenever possible, before making a decision.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When Abigail E. Eternity asks for her life story, Abyssal points out that if she was writing a novel based on what she went through it would be 52 chapters long, 53 counting the most recent incident. The discussion occurs on chapter 53 of the story proper...
- Living MacGuffin: She learns, to her horror, that if any of the major power blocs were to learn she's an independent Living Core, they would spare no expense to capture, reprogram, and enslave her, or failing that, destroy her.
- Locked Out of the Loop: A lot of the story's conflict could have been avoided if she was simply informed of what's going on, instead of everybody going "Shoot first, ask later, maybe."
- Mood-Swinger: She goes through her emotions pretty quickly. In fact, Kuon once states that she goes through her emotions like an infant goes through diapers.
- Pinball Protagonist: She's dragged along by the plot, kicking and screaming. Justified by the fact that her ship was a barely held together derelict for the better part of 30 chapters, and every time she tries to grab the reigns of her destiny, she tends to get shot at!
- Poor Communication Kills: Another reason she usually gets shot at or taken captive is that her coms system wasn't working at the time. That, or she's too scared by who she sees, and is too busy actively trying to flee to communicate.
- Took a Level in Badass: For the vast majority of the story, all she could do was run and hide as just about everybody shot at her. Come chapter 83, and she's managed to get herself upgraded to a respectable destroyer, fighting Sensenmann and giving just as good as she gets, even managing to land a powerful blow against the latter's destroyer form, being the only character to ever draw first blood, on screen.
Kuon
First mate aboard the Abyssal and the second of the Living Core introduced in chapter 10. She also serves as the ship's live-in maid. She and Meica are initially quite hostile to each other but eventually become Vitriolic Best Buds.
- Because You Were Nice to Me: She's ecstatic to serve under Abyssal, despite the latter's annoying quirks, because Abyssal treats her as an equal, with kindness and respect.
- Black-and-White Insanity: Combined with Honor Before Reason. She's pretty much hard-wired to follow the cultural mores of New England, even when they're suicidal, and is murderously bloodthirsty against pirates and other criminals.
- British Stuffiness: Since she first came on-line in New England and was a New England Battlecruiser until she literally ripped herself in half trying to escape a losing battle, stranded in space, she's stuck with a rough equivalent of the mores of Victorian England and all the rigidness that comes with them.
- Commander Contrarian: Downplayed. She has taken it upon herself to question and second-guess every one of her captain Abyssal's actions and plans. If Abyssal decides to carry them out anyway, she then sighs and resigns herself to trying to make those plans work, no matter how inane she thinks they are.
- Dark and Troubled Past: She awoke to life as a Living Core and underwent experimentation described as just shy of torture, but had no frame of reference for what "pain" is, so just shrugged it off as operational errors. Once she was programmed to serve as a maid, she was put into the service of an extremely sexual deviant Viscount who not only used her as a sex-toy himself, but passed her around to his ship's crew, male and female alike, like one passes around a bottle of A-1 steak sauce at a BBQ. This made her very, very uncomfortable, but she didn't understand why. When her country, New England, went to war with Freedom Union and Dawning Star, her masters would summarily ignore her input and well-being, going full tilt I Don't Pay You to Think, concerned only with their own glory. When she was sent into a battle she knew would result in her destruction, she got her payback, blaming an "unknown anomaly" for her emergency warp-out to an unknown and vacant sector of space, her depraved Viscount being the first to fall as the crew descended into madness.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: When Abyssal brings Meica unto the ship, she acts more like a wife who is being introduced to her husband's new paramour than a first mate worried about the background of a new crewmember.
- The Dog Bites Back: As a direct result of her Dark and Troubled Past, she quietly sabotaged every effort the crew made to send a distress signal and did her best to ensure the crew would not be rescued, taking perverted glee as the "human pigs" turned on each other, even thinking it's all Worth It when the last survivor desperately tried to breed her as seeing his face twisted in madness and despair made it all worthwhile.
- Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: She is so cynical and jaded that she goes and mocks Abbigail E. Eternity's good will while their ship is disabled and locked down inside the cargo bay of the Heavy Carrier Eternity and surrounded by turrets and heavily armed combat drones, and refuses to stop doing it no matter how much Abyssal tells her to cool it, until Abyssal says "yes, Abbigail, we accept your offer of friendship!" at which point, Kuon just sighs and states "if that is your will, Master" with a tone that would indicate she'd be rolling her eyes if she could.
- Fantastic Racism: She's picked up on her New England policy of discrimination against the Nekomi. Even when she realizes it's entirely irrational, she just can't help herself.
- I Am Not Pretty: She genuinely doesn't understand why Abyssal fawn over her maid avatar.
- Innocently Insensitive: At one point, she tries to dispose of the skeletal remains of Kapitan, not realizing their sentimental value to Abyssal. They actively fight over it. It's only much later, after a thorough process of elimination that they learn those remains are Abyssal's core.
- Madden Into Misanthropy: Her horrific backstory has made her exceptionally jaded, thinking the absolute worst of everyone she meets. She responds to being treated with respect by Abyssal with utter confusion, and is even more confused that the latter is horrified at hearing said backstory to the point of tears, if Abyssal wasn't stuck in a drone's body without that ability.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Literally. When she posits the theory that the main Abyssal persona is a "host" and Abby is the real personality, our protagonist goes into such an existential crisis that she goes full-tilt "divide by zero error."
- Ninja Maid: Invoked. She was programmed with a maid persona and she was a powerful battle cruiser in her day. In the present, she's more than content to be a maid and help design blueprints for her new Master Abyssal.
- Rape as Backstory: The primary reason she is so cynical and defiant is that during her Royal Navy service, her Viscount owner not only sexually exploited her himself, but gave his entire crew carte blanche to do the same, and kept telling her it was her job to let it happen, for the sake of crew morale. She was given neither the right nor the ability to say no, no matter how repulsive she found it. She takes extreme perverted pleasure dragging them off to the middle of nowhere and watching them go mad with hunger, killing each other.
- Servile Snarker: She may love to serve Abyssal, but she also loves to snark at her master's shortcomings.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: She and Meica hurl insults at each other just for the heck of it, but when push comes to shove, they work together seamlessly and they cover for each other.
- What Is This Feeling?: In her internal narration, when she's describing her service in New England's Royal Navy, she makes a point of stating that her budding emotions weren't well established, so she didn't understand what her unpleasant feelings of being bossed around or used as a sex toy meant, but she did understand fear when her very existence was in peril.
Meica
The resident Nekomi Cat Girl. She is rescued by Abyssal from a couple of pirates and brought aboard the crew.
- Berserk Button: Don't call her a "cat." It's a Fantastic Slur.
- Birds of a Feather: She bonds with Abyssal because the latter shares her love of spaceships and engineering.
- Cat Girl: Invoked. In this fictional universe, Elon Musk actually succeeds at his internet boast of genetically engineering anime cat-girls.
- The Engineer: Spaceship building is her passion, and drawing up blueprints makes her happier than anything, save getting her hands on fresh fish.
- Genius Ditz: She's the polar opposite of Abyssal. In engineering and ship design, she excels, but at everything else, including shopping for warp-fuel, so the ship known as Abyssal can finally jump out of the Maw of Lawless Space, she completely fails unless Abyssal is literally holding her hand.
- I Just Want to Be Free: She finds running the Dawning Star corporation she's the heiress of boring as hell. What she really wants out of life is to freely sail the stars and work on new and interesting blueprints.
- The Perils of Being the Best: The reason she's the heiress is that she's the best engineer. This results in her being groomed to run the company against her wishes, so she bolts inside a pirate ship first chance she gets. She winds up being literally caged in Go-Go Enslavement gear until she's rescued by Abyssal.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: She flees her home and family because she doesn't want to be the heir of Nippon Steel, finding the management of company policy and governmental politics boring. She happens to be right in that while she's an excellent engineer, she'd be terrible at running a company, as she's too ditzy to handle it with any level of competence.
- Rebellious Princess: She's actually the heiress of a powerful Dawning Star corporation, but she wants no part of it, so she ran away from home.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: She and Kuon hurl insults at each other just for the heck of it all the time, but they both admit being an excellent team and will go to bat for each other when things get rough.
Pirates:
Astral
The first human Abyssal meets, as a result of being shot at from behind and then dumps an obsolete communications system with an automated message telling her to "go home" as a "friendly warning." When she encounters Abyssal even further in The Maw of Lawless Space, she attacks again. This leads to a major brew-ha-ha as just about every faction, there looking for a rumored ancient relic, comes to investigate.
- Appeal to Worse Problems: When Abyssal calls her out for being fired on, completely unprovoked, and complying with her request to flee the area, Astral retorts "there are worse bullies than me out there" and shoot harder. Thus drawing the attention of every Jane, Dianne, and Lucy currently in the Maw of Lawless Space.
- Attack Hello: She "greets" Abyssal the first time by firing on her. When they happen to be near the old coordinates of Little Bigfoot station, she fires on Abyssal again as the latter is trying to flee from her.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: She demands Abyssal share her back-story, cliff-notes version. She gets it in a short paragraph rant, mostly indicating how Abyssal tends to get shot at.“Well alright, here it goes. Long story short, I flew around aimlessly, looted a dead cruiser, found Kuon, got shot by you, assimilated a freighter, met Meica, went asteroid mining, got shot by Jinko, went into hiding, upgraded my ship, got shot by you again, and—”
- Broken Pedestal: She used to be a Child Soldier in Freedom Union, but some unstated incident caused her to lose faith in her home country and rebel. Now she's a wanted "terrorist."
- Dramatic Irony: She's spent a very, very long time in the Maw of Lawless Space looking for Living Cores. She completely misses Kuon in the Victory class derelict, despite carefully scanning the hulk, and openly fires on Abyssal the first time they met, leaving behind a recorded message "you're weak, give up on space and go home" not realizing that Abyssal, the ship, had two cores on it, and Abyssal herself was flying blind without any navigational data, so couldn't go "home" if she tried!
- Fiery Redhead: She sports blazing red hair and is very hot-blooded.
- For Your Own Good: Every time she fires on Abyssal, she passes it off as "a friendly lesson in how harsh space is" and actually gets mad that Abyssal doesn't agree, so just decides to shoot harder.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: She instructs Abyssal to lay down a mine-field to prevent treachery from Jinko. This minefield becomes a hindrance when having to deal with Sensenmann.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In chapter 74, she has Abyssal, finally able to sport a proper avatar, in one of her hideouts, and demands the latter's life story and specifies "I want the very, very short version, not the seventy or so chapters!"
- Noodle Incident: Just what caused her to turn on Freedom Union? Whatever it is, nobody's telling.
- Used to Be a Sweet Child: According to Abbigail E. Eternity, she used to an adorable little ankle biter who loved to hug her and address her as "Enty" promising to be the core's Ace Pilot. Then some unstated incident stole her innocence and she became the grumpy cynic she is now.
- Wants a Prize for Basic Decency: She cites three You Owe Me debts for Abyssal either being spared or "rescued" from pursuers by Astral. She never stops to consider Abyssal was only in peril because Astral fired on her in the first place, completely unprovoked.
- Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: She's got tech so far above everyone else that she can wield the firepower of a battleship in a small corvette, and her obsolete stuff gives Abyssal a major upgrade every time she gets some.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: When she's finally able to talk things out with Abyssal, she's horrified at how the latter was adrift in the very heart of The Maw of Lawless Space and doesn't know where "home" is, so telling her "go home and don't come back" was utterly pointless.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: She's now considered a "terrorist" by Freedom Union because she is fighting the corruption of the top brass.
The smugglers
A couple of drug smugglers who show up to a distress call moments after Abyssal arrived at the scene and had just finished assimilating the nearly destroyed fighter plane that was the source. They make the mistake of thinking the S.A.S Abyssal is the source of the signal and a derelict, bringing her aboard. They wind up being jailed inside their own ship, their Nekomi captive freed, and when Abyssal and crew find a space-station, getting jettisoned in an escape pod as their ship is stolen, with the very drugs they were smuggling swirling as a cloud around that very same pod.
- Drugs Are Bad: Abyssal was ambivalent about if they were pirates or not until Kuon scanned the contents of their cargo and learned the open crates with blue crystals were mind-altering drugs. Kuon wanted to vent them into space without a suit. Abyssal wanted to turn them in for a bounty, but when that wasn't possible, split the middle and just dumped them outside Ashen Port in an escape pod, distress signal blaring.
- Laser-Guided Karma: They caged Meica, put her in Go-Go Enslavement gear, and planned to sell her to slavery, and responded to a distress call, not to try and rescue survivors, but to kill and loot, planning to sell the S.A.S. Abyssal. They wind up caged in their own ship, and when Abyssal manages to reach the nearest port, their ship is stolen from them and they are set adrift in space, S.O.S. blaring.
- No Name Given: They are never named, and there's no need to know it, seeing as they're in an escape pod in Lawless Space and have nothing of value to exchange for their lives...
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: Turns out, caging Meica was justified. Her mother put out a bounty for her return after she fled from her home and duties. If they had returned to port and turned her in, after learning she's a stowaway, they would have been well rewarded. Unfortunately, they decided to try and sell her into slavery. Oof, was that a mistake.
- Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: It was the fact that they put Meica in a cage like an animal and bragging of their plans to sell her into slavery that tips the scales and causes Abyssal to assimilate and steal their ship.
- Small Role, Big Impact: They are throw-away characters, literally, but if not for them, Abyssal and Meica would have never met, and it would have been much, much harder for Abyssal to even find civilization, not to mention upgrade her ship to the point where she can actually hold her own.
Sensenmann
Known as "The Reaper," she alone is one of the big power blocs of the story.
- Cute and Psycho: Invoked. She intentionally sports the appearance of a broken and distressed little girl to guilt-trip and traumatize the people she preys upon and who have to fight her.
- Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: Invoked. She intentionally wears this look to demoralize her enemies.
- Eye-Obscuring Hat: She wears a hat that hides one of her eyes.
- Hate Sink: She has no redeeming features and is hated by the fanbase.
- Hypocrite: She loathes the Freedom Union for using child soldiers, yet she intentionally looks like one to demoralize her enemies.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Her missiles have excellent tracking, but her ballistics and lasers are very easy to dodge, even her corrosion torpedoes, as her accuracy is terrible. The only times her torpedoes actually hit is if she manages to catch you by surprise, right on top of you, or has used a Macross Missile Massacre to disable you first.
- Jack of All Trades: The reason her ship always looks like a random collection of crates is that she carries around modules to deal with any situation, so when she's in battle, she can swap out her equipment at a moment's notice to counter whatever she's dealing with.
- Ramming Always Works: Played with. She rams a battleship sized version of herself into the heavy carrier Eternity, and this does an impressive amount of damage, then swarms the ship with offensive combat drones, and lastly self-destructs the battle-ship when this isn't as damaging or as quick as she likes. The Eternity survives it all but is out of the fight as Eternity self-repairs.
- Revenge Before Reason: She signed a deal with Jinko to track down Meica if the latter would help her sink the ship Abigail E. Eternity. Jinko kept her part of the deal best she could, but because the Eternity survived the clash, even with Sensenmann crashing and self-destructing a battleship into the Union carrier, Sensenmann swore, and tried to carry out, bloody vengeance.
- Speak Ill of the Dead: She lures Astral to the very same husk Abyssal looted earlier and showcases that she dragged a bunch of wrecks caused by her attacking and killing people. She mocks their corpses as she's fighting Astral to boast of her superiority complex and other forms of trash-talk. When the fight turns in Astral's favor, Sensenmann then simply slips into her alternate dimension and disappears.
- Stealth Hi/Bye: Weaponized. She can just suddenly appear, fire, and then disappear again into some kind of extra-dimensional space. Even when she doesn't wield exceptional stealth gear, this makes contact with her very problematic.
- Tautological Templar: She's firmly of the opinion that the rumored relic containing a bunch of Life Core shouldn't fall into "the wrong hands" is an inherently noble goal, so the methods she uses should be inherently noble too, even if one of them is actively firing her corrosion torpedoes on a clearly innocent Abyssal.
Dawning Star Empire:
Jinko
First met in Ashen station sipping tea outside the day job office, she hunts down Abyssal only because the latter has Meica in her crew, and then only because Meica's mother commissioned her to bring her daughter back, alive, and unharmed as much as possible.
- Beat Them at Their Own Game: On the wrong end. She sends a stealth fighter at Abyssal's frigate as the latter was in the process of asteroid mining. Abyssal responds with the stealth fighter she originally started as and catches her off-guard, capturing and assimilating the stealth fighter. Jinko is duly impressed at being Outgambitted.
- Occidental Otaku: She's obsessed with reenacting the Japanese stereotypes of tea-ceremonies, haikus, and all other oriental stuff.
- An Offer You Can't Refuse: Gets one from Meica's mother. Bringing Meica home alive and as intact as possible would result in getting some of the company's most advanced tech and a metric ton of money. Refusal to take the mission would be seen as disobeying orders.
- Punch-Clock Villain: She's only antagonistic to Abyssal because she was hired to bring Meica back to her mother. When Abyssal and Astral agree to help her comply with the mission, the three of them manage to put together a coherent, if fragile, alliance.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Finding herself in a battle royale with Astral, Freedom Union, and New England, while trying to secure the S.A.S. Abyssal, and having the latter flee, she tries to withdraw from the battle. This tips off everybody that the Abyssal is valuable for some reason.
Hikari
The first of Jinko's subordinates.
- Information Broker: In addition to her duties under Jinko, she makes her living by collecting, trading, and selling information.
Yoake
The third and last of Jinko's fleet introduced to the audience, and the most junior member.
- Back-to-Back Badasses: As spaceships, as much as that can be done. She and Abyssal wind up hull-to-hull squaring off against Sensenmann. Yoake's annihilation cruiser using its point defenses to deal with incoming missiles while the Abyssal deals with Sensenmann directly, trying to keep the antagonist from firing its corrosive torpedoes.
- Emotionless Girl: As a very young Living Core, her emotions haven't developed yet, so she's exceptionally stoic.
- My Master, Right or Wrong: As far as she's concerned, Jinko's word is law. Jinko herself is trying to wean her off this mindset, to think independently, with limited success.
- This Is Going to Suck: When Sensenmann has her cruiser dead to rights and is about to fire her corrosion torpedos, Yoake closes her eyes to prepare herself for pain worse than anything imaginable, but the pain never comes, as Abyssal, who has experienced that pain, comes to her rescue, actually being the first to on-screen land a decisive blow on that pirate's destroyer form.
New England:
Lady Lucky
The leader of a three ship band of New England Victory class ships. She hails Sensenmann and Abyssal, after firing on both.
- Cavalry Betrayal: She fires on Sensenmann as the latter is one-sidedly attacking Abyssal, but shortly afterwards turns her guns on Abyssal too.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Unlike Sensenmann, her accuracy is impeccable. In exchange, her guns take longer to reload.
- Large Ham: She's very loud and flamboyant.
Freedom Union:
Abgigail E. Eternity
The carrier for Freedom Union.
- Forced into Evil: Even if she rebels, the brainwashed child soldiers will still be brainwashed child soldiers, they'll just be in an even worse environment. So, she pinches her nose and serves her country best she can.
- Immortal Immaturity: She's a Living Core that won't die of old age and altered her avatar to look and act like a child.
- It Amused Me: She helps out Abyssal when the latter's in her custody for a lark.
- My Country, Right or Wrong: She knows the Freedom Union is as corrupt as hell, but she's still loyal to her nation.
- Zerg Rush: Her primary means of combat is to send out massive numbers of drone fighters to overwhelm her enemies.
Dr. Julian
The top medic aboard the Abigail E. Eternity.
- Child Hater: Although the kids on the ship love her, she equates them to little monsters.
- The Cynic: She knows her country is a corrupt False Utopia, but there's nothing she can do about it, so she just resigns herself to keep the damage at a minimum.
- Forced into Evil: Just like with Abigail, if she wasn't the medic watching over the children and tending to their needs, they would still be exploited, but their fate would be even worse.
- You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: When she learns Abigail's been doing a bunch of warp jumps without providing shielding to poor Meica, letting the cat girl suffer needlessly, she rips out the shield from her own personal freighter to hand over for Abyssal to assimilate and install.
