7.6.2014

Today has been a very surprising day in many ways.

As stated in yesterday's entry, I took U and together, we were driven to the secret production factory, where we found, to our surprise, the American operatives Sanford and Deimos themselves. They said that they had flown in earlier that morning for a variety of reasons, and this was one of them. Another reason was that they wanted to introduce us to the new fleet girl whom we were notified of earlier this week, Libeccio, the Italian destroyer. In addition, Littorio and Roma, the two Italian battleship girls who had already been constructed, had flown in just hours before our arrival at the factory with Marco to also greet their new Italian comrade.

I must say, the Wunderwaffe team has done a fantastic job constructing Libeccio. She looks very much so like her people of the region in which she had been constructed - her first iteration, I should say. Marco, who went through the trouble of looking up historical information on Libeccio, told me that she had been originally built in Ancona, further down the Adriatic Coast, which explains her darker skin tone compared to her battleship sisters. Littorio and Roma are quite happy to have a destroyer child as part of their small fleet, Littorio more so, for she spent hours fawning over their new arrival. Libeccio also happened to get along very well with U. It was very sweet watching them interact - they were behaving like two puppies, U being the more shy one and Libeccio being the more outgoing one.

Now down to business - Sanford and Deimos took all of us into the factory, and the Heckler & Koch engineers who had been working with them greeted us to reveal the new prototype weapon that they had been working on specifically for U-511's exclusive use. U sounded very surprised by this, as much as I was when I first heard of this from Sanford yesterday, the fact that there had been a weapon being developed specifically for her. She stammered quite adorably to the American operatives that she didn't know what she had done to deserve such an exclusive award - but Deimos simply replied that it wasn't because of what she had done, but instead because of what she would do. Somehow these words seem very prophetic, but this definitely seems like this weapon that they had developed for U was an incredibly heavy investment. And so it seemed - after arriving in their innermost laboratory, the Americans and the H&K engineer team finally showcased to us their classified product.

In reality, this was not a single weapon but instead a set of weapons, two pieces of equipment to be exact. The first piece was a vest that looks very similar to a downsized anti-explosive flak jacket. This vest was to act as a cloaking device for U, turning her from a combat submarine into a stealth submarine, which sounds very good to me. I am no military expert, but when U tried on the vest and turned invisible, it wowed everyone in the room, even the engineers who had built them, since they had never tried it on their intended test subject, U, before today. They considered the vest an immediate success, and U was quite thrilled to be the owner of such an awesome new piece of equipment. I should imagine that invisibility is quite the powerful ability, even for ship girls.

(I say that I am no military expert, but my good friend and coworker Heidi Nussenbaum, the Minister of Defense with whom we had been working with to get the Bundestag to pass those laws to expand military spending, has gone to great lengths to familiarize me with the specifications of our armed forces. Please blame her for possessing more knowledge about military matters than I should as a civilian.)

The second piece of equipment was a combat rifle. Now, this was no ordinary rifle. Its name was the H&K C-10 Canister Rifle, Mk. VI, meaning that this was the sixth generation prototype that had been manufactured so far in the weapon's development cycle. When they first unveiled it, it did not look so impressive - I had seen other sniper rifles, particularly those they call "anti-materiel" sniper rifles, that were much bigger. This C-10 rifle, when they first revealed it, appeared to have the length of one of our current standard-issue rifles, the G-36, with its overall length perhaps no more than 75 centimeters. But there was more to it than met the eye - Deimos asked U to pick up the rifle, and when she did, it suddenly expanded to a length of 1300 millimeters. This rifle, according to the weapons team, was generations ahead of current military technology in the small arms field (if this rifle could even be considered "small arms" by this point). It had its own cloaking device that was based off the same technology that made U's new cloaking vest possible and, better yet, was already synchronized with the vest's internal cloaking structure so that whenever U turns invisible while wielding the rifle, the rifle too will turn invisible with her. It shoots an incredible range of small arms calibers, anywhere from simple American .223 cartridge to the excessively heavy 14.5x114mm anti-materiel round used by the Soviets during the war for their PTRS rifles and the American 25x59mm grenade rounds. And in order to make this feat possible, the barrel portion of the C-10 rifle appeared to be some kind of futuristic technology that one would see in that American movie series the Transformers, and when U played around with the weapon before us, the rifle's barrel transformed before our eyes, from a thin, skinny barrel of the .223 to a massive, thick barrel complete with a muzzle brake for the heavier calibers.

The Americans explained that they had incorporated the same technology that they used to build the ship girls into this weapon - Smartsteel, they called it. This elusive building material that made up the body composition of fleet personnel had also been put to use into this weapon, and because of it, the rifle could switch barrels within mere moments at U's will to accommodate any fire mission at hand. Moreover, this rifle is not bolt-action as is customary for many anti-materiel rifles, but semi-automatic. And for standard small arms calibers such as the NATO 5.56 and 7.62, the rifle can even be set on fully automatic, like a traditional assault rifle. It even comes with its whole host of weapon accessories, such as a high-powered military flashlight, a collapsible stock, auto-adjusting hand grips and foregrips, an auto-setting bipod, ballistics measurement computer, and a multi-vision and multi-zoom telescopic sight capable of giving standard, thermal, and infrared options that can also collapse into the rifle's body itself to allow for the use of a built-in red-dot sight for use at closer ranges. This whole slew of accessories, enough to make any gun enthusiast begin to drool, was justified in the sense that U would never have to worry about fiddling with rifle maintenance, for all the parts and accessories that a good sniper would need was already provided in this rifle system alone.

Now is the time I must pull off my most believable American commercial side: but wait! That's not all!

As though all of this were not enough, the Americans and the development team there at the factory took even more steps to further empower this new prototype weapon: they had also made it so that the C-10 rifle can fire concentrated bursts of electromagnetic pulse energy to disable enemy electronics in a certain area. The longer U wishes to build up charge on her shot, the larger the area of effect and the more persistent its effects. And lastly, the rifle possesses an underslung low-frequency targeting device that can broadcast coordinates for air support or nearby friendly artillery listening for its signals.

Much like myself, when the Americans explained all the uses of this new weapon, U seemed very overwhelmed. She thought that being able to claim exclusive ownership to this futuristic-looking combat rifle that seemed like it was taken straight out of a military science fiction book or game was cool enough, so when she was told of all of the rifle's abilities, she just gave everyone an awkward, empty smile that screamed, "Please help, I don't know what to do with my life".

Finally, the tour ended with an hour of U playing around with her new weapon, giving the engineers from H&K some raw data that they could work with to further fine-tune the prototype weapon for deployment to U very soon. I took the Italians, with the new arrival Libeccio, and U back to our home, where Gernot, having come home early to greet our good friend Marco, and the rest of the girls welcomed us for afternoon.

Like U, Lebe and Max were very excited to finally be able to meet another destroyer comrade. So was Prinz Eugen, who would warmly welcome any newcomer anyway, but she gave an extra warm welcome to Libeccio. Libeccio, for her part, was utterly thrilled to be able to meet so many ship girls like herself and was very happy that there were other destroyers like herself. Everyone was happy to meet Littorio, who is a fantastic cook and a beautiful and courteous lady, and Bismarck engaged in her usual hostilities with Roma. My husband and I spent much of the evening catching up with Marco, and today has been a wonderful day, certainly the kind of weekend that Gernot and I desperately needed from the strain of our work over the past week.

But it was inevitable that our conversation this evening would slowly turn to the topic of the ambush attack at the Japanese naval yards of Yokosuka. Marco expressed his deep concerns about this ambush attack, saying that he deeply sympathized with the Japanese, for his own country of Italy could very well be in a similar situation to Japan, the two nations being surrounded by the sea. He asked us if we had taken any steps to bolster our armed forces, but we told him about our efforts, with which he also sympathized. However, he pointed out that public knowledge of these naval attacks committed by these mysterious seafaring alien species, the Abyssals, would soon rise to the point where governments of all major world countries would have no choice but to bolster their defenses against this new global threat. These were terrorists, Marco pointed out, citing the words of the American Seal Team Six operatives when they had spoken to us in the beginning.

"I do not know about you, but I will not allow terrorists to bring harm to my country or my people," Marco declared.

How valiant.

I asked Marco what his thoughts were of a possible connection between the international terrorist group, the A.A.H.W., that Seal Team Six were so keen on going after and the mysterious Abyssals. Marco said that he would not be surprised if future events revealed that there was in fact a connection between them. There were already too many similarities between them anyway, and as he explained his reasoning, I realized that perhaps this was indeed the case. These two groups are too mysterious, too engimatic, and we do not know enough about them; they are both terrorists in some regard; and they have already both demonstrated that they are willing to resort to destructive force to commit their acts of terrorism.

Now that I have been enlightened of these similarities, I rather wish I did not ask Marco this.

Marco is spending the night here before he leaves back for Italy tomorrow. Littorio and Roma and Libeccio will stay with us for perhaps around a week before heading back down to Italy. Before we retired for the night, I found Retia playing around with the Italians in the living room, and they have been teaching her Italian words just so that they can squeal and be amused by Retia's struggling pronunciation. Too cute.