and royalroad.The S.A.S. Abyssal is a ship powered by an AI by the same name who apparently was a male space fanboy, but woke up as a female Living Core. Her ship is adrift, derelict, with no navigational or astrogating data, badly damaged, and with an uranium powered reactor running on fumes, powered only by the decay of radioactive isotopes. Abyssal has no choice but to fly blind until she maybe finds her way to civilization. She loots an even worse derelict to find some batteries that at least help her manage her meager power reserves and her first mate, Kuon. She then chances upon a distress signal, finds the pilot which sent the signal dead just a little over a day before her arrival, and gets the jump on pirates who came to loot the place by faking being the source of the signal, as a dead fighter, rescues a cat-girl slave prisoner and jails the pirates, finally getting that astrogating data she needs, and trying to gain her independence by mining the nearby asteroids in exchange for supplies. During all this, she keeps getting fired on for no rational reason and winds up being the center of a major conflict.
Associated Tropes:
- Be Careful What You Wish For: The unnamed guy who spent his life playing space-based video-games, wishing for adventures in space, gets reincarnated as a spaceship and quickly finds "her" life in hard-mode, getting beat around by just about everybody else.
- Beware the Silly Ones: All the Living Cores have quirks that make them goofy, at best, but they're all quite dangerous when provoked, the instant they have the ability to retaliate. Abyssal is an Endearingly Dorky ditz who is actually deceptively cunning. Kuon, her first mate, is a Ninja Maid who used to be a battle-cruiser that retaliated against being treated as a communal sex-toy by the unnamed Viscount and his crew, and having her well-justified warnings ignored by using an emergency warping to a random (and vacant) part of space, happily watching said crew turn on each other as supplies ran out, and then disguising herself as a Rubik's cube so the pirates who came to loot the wreck ignored her. She suffers from Honor Before Reason Black-and-White Insanity as a result. Jinko of the Dawn Star empire is a heavy cruiser obsessed with speaking in haikus, badly, and her two subordinate cruisers are almost as bad. Abigail E. Eternity is a Freedom Union Heavy Carrier and suffers from extreme Immortal Immaturity. Sensenmann is just straight-up Cute and Psycho.
- Circular Reasoning: The Nekomi race, as a whole, suffer from it. They are routinely discriminated against, chased out of their homes, refused honest employment, and when they're forced to turn to crime to survive, the fact that they're criminals is used to then further justify the discrimination they suffered in the first place.
- Dystopia: In several flavors. The New England interstellar country is a Feudal Future, and all the horrors that come with it. The Freedom Union is a False Utopia run by a very, very corrupt government that employs brainwashed child soldiers, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The Dawning Star empire combines the Police State and Corporate Crony Capitalism flavors. The neutral zone is known as The Maw of Lawless Space and all the other power blocs happily leave it that way so they can fight their proxy wars without having to worry about innocent civilians getting caught in the crossfire.
- Fantastic Slur: Don't call someone from the Nekomi race a "cat." They will see that as an insult to their honor, as anyone who does is quietly telling them that they're deceptive, lazy, and thieving.
- Pinball Protagonist: Justified. Abyssal spends the vast majority of the story being dragged around by the plot, because her ship is an extremely outdated antique, and derelict at that. Plus, whenever she actively tries to grasp the reigns of her destiny, she tends to get shot at!
- Servant Race: The Living Core ships, with the exception of Abyssal, are all owned by some faction, even the pirate Sensenmann. There are a rare few that manage to gain some semblance of independence, but the norm is for them to get "reprogrammed" into the personality they sport and enslaved into their roles. Naturally, even though they have repeatedly demonstrated their sapience, laws that would address and redress their exploitation are slow in coming.
