Wednesday, January 15th, 2014.
It was hella awkward at breakfast this morning. Word that I had ripped Murakumo a new one had quickly spread overnight throughout the base - well, that's not exactly all that hard to do when there's only me and a handful of other ship girls on site anyway, so Mamiya, Houshou, and Irako were all painfully conscious of it when I walked into the cafeteria to make my breakfast and found everyone else already there. It had been fairly quiet when I walked in, but the moment they realized I was strolling in they all shut up right away and ate their food in silence. Usually I sit in the mess hall too, not necessarily with the girls but by myself in another table nearby, but today I sat two tables over from where I normally sit. But barely five minutes into eating I felt like the atmosphere was gonna choke me the hell out if I didn't move myself out, so I just thought fuck this and picked up my food to go eat in my office.
Honestly, it's better that I did that at the time.
As if karma was rippin' my ass a new buttcrack, I found a giant three-foot stack of reports and papers sitting on my desk. As it turns out, the mission review profiles that I processed from my ship girls' got received and analyzed hella quick over at HQ in Tokyo, which I should've expected seeing how high of a classification level the entire Moebius Armament Program is by itself. The one silver lining with that giant stack of reports and papers and orders was that there was a small box sitting on the middle of my desk, containing the extension cord that I had ordered in order to hook up the stereos on the walls of my office to my laptop, so the first thing I did was open it up and hook up my devices. At least I was able to put on some relaxing chillstep music while I pored over those reports one by one.
By the way, I forgot to mention this but I've moved my drilling times for the ship girls up earlier in the day because I've been sending them on their missions in the early afternoon. I don't know if that'll stay that way or if their mission times will be more variable in the future, but it'll depend on what they find on their scouting missions and what HQ determines and recommends that I instruct them to do.
That being said, I cancelled drilling for today because it rained pretty hard overnight and it was still raining for a bit in the morning right up until lunch. Literally the rain stopped ten minutes before scheduled drilling, like nature was saying haha fuck you, yeah that's right, that's what you get for treating your own girls like shit, bastard. Like, okay, what am I supposed to do, just go up to them and apologize like it was nothing, what I did yesterday?
But even if drilling was canceled, missions can't be canceled. It's not like ship girls need to worry about the cold or the temperature like normal humans do. They can feel cold or warmth, but it's not going to make them uncomfortable or kill them like humans will. The only time they need to worry about in terms of weather is when they're out at sea, where it'll be stormy and the skies will be dark and the waters will be hard to work with. But despite that, a mission's a mission.
I sent them off at 1230 Hours this time to take advantage of the fact that it had stopped raining. The rainclouds were still overhead, so knowing how weather works, I guessed that it would rain again later today.
The freaky thing is, when the ship girls came into my office to receive their mission briefing, Murakumo's head arrays were lit bright, bright red. Normally they'd be green. I wonder what that meant, hmm...
So partly because of that, I literally told them to leave now with the same objectives. They weren't in my office for more than half a minute. But again, Samidare lagged behind when everyone else filed out and talked to me for a bit. She said that after the yelling that I had given Murakumo, she had gone into her dorm room and talked things out, so apparently things were cool between them now. But she told me that if I didn't want Murakumo to keep sulking for a long time, and she implored me to make up with her. Hopefully that didn't come out wrong. But I told Samidare that I didn't know how I'd build back the bridge that I burned yesterday. I didn't know any of them well enough to know how I'd make it up to Murakumo. To be honest, not only did I burn the bridge, but it felt like I nuked it from orbit with a giant particle beam accelerator cannon or something. Samidare told me to buy her or make her a cake.
A cake? Is Samidare trying to pull a GlaDos on me? ? ?
Samidare explained that because Christmas had just passed recently, Murakumo had wanted to get into some festivities, but because they weren't allowed to go out and spend the holidays out in the cities, everyone got bummed out, Murakumo in particular. Apparently she wanted to buy and eat a Christmas-themed cake. So Samidare said that if I could buy one or make one for her, it would probably have a good chance of getting her spirits up and save my reputation.
I told Samidare that I don't give a shit about reputation. Well, that's not accurate, I do to a certain extent, but I care more about not making Murakumo my permanent enemy for the rest of the time that I'm here at Okinawa than trying to make amends simply for the sake of reputation. But I told her that I would consider it. I asked Samidare if her opinion of me changed at all. She said that she now knew that I had some things to work on, but she said she was grateful that I was willing to stand up for her. She said that there weren't very many people she met before who had defended her like that.
So after they left, I headed over to the mess hall where Irako was planning what she and Mamiya would make for dinner tonight when the ship girls came back from their mission. I asked her if the kitchens had stuff to make a cake, and Irako and I checked our foodstuff supplies but found that we couldn't make a cake with what we had. We were running low on eggs, and we had no whipped cream or anything to make little Christmas decorations on the cake to make it all Christmas-themed like Murakumo had wanted. Irako asked me why I wanted to make a cake, and I explained the whole bit about me and Murakumo and how Samidare told me that I should make a cake for her to calm her down and stuff.
Irako informed me of a town nearby outside of base, a town called Ginoza, where there was a little supermarket where I could probably go and buy the stuff I needed to make a cake. I asked her if there was like a cake shop there too, but she said she wasn't sure. She hadn't actually been there herself. So I decided just to go right away. I put on my civvie clothes and started walking over, since we don't have any land vehicles on site. The only vehicles are the ship girls...and for obvious reasons I refrain from calling them "vehicles".
It shouldn't come as a surprise that twenty minutes into the walk to Ginoza, it started raining again. It took forty minutes to walk there. Fuck me.
As I thought, there was no specialty cake shop there in town, but I did find the rest of the ingredients I needed to make a cake. I've made cakes before - mainly for myself on my own birthdays, but I only did that when I was in high school, and afterwards I promised myself I wouldn't waste my own time like that ever again. If you wanna celebrate birthdays, they ought'a be celebrated with other people. Birthdays are never meant to be celebrated by yourself and only yourself. Something's very wrong if you think celebrating your own birthday by yourself is good in any way.
Even worse, after I bought everything that I needed, when I exited the supermarket, I found the rain pouring down even harder. It was at the point where the ingredients in my bags would be thoroughly ruined if I didn't cover them or protect them somehow, and it wasn't looking like I could just sit the rain out. So I had to bite the bullet and take off my coat to put over my bags and carry them that way for forty minutes back to base. In America, we've got this saying "when it rains it pours", meaning that if one thing goes wrong, suddenly you could feel like everything else that day is going wrong. I like to call it Murphy's Law. I don't know if Japanese has a phrase like that.
So that sucked, but at least the ingredients were safe since my coat was moderately waterproof. The ship girls hadn't come back by the time I came back from the supermarket, so I took a hot shower before going into the kitchens to make Murakumo a cake. It took me a few tries to get it right, since my cake-making skills were extremely rusty, but eventually I got one that was good enough. Not something I'd be proud of, but not something you'd look at and start doubting the taste just by its looks. Mamiya, who had come back to the kitchens after helping Houshou out with plans for the new izakaya, offered her assistance after hearing the context from Irako, but I declined, telling her that this was something I would have to do, and that accepting someone else's help would feel like a cheap cop-out.
When I taste-tested my cake, it didn't taste great. It didn't taste bad, just it didn't taste like anything spectacular or memorable. But usually whenever I make food for myself, I usually don't cook for the taste, just to get myself fed. But when I asked Mamiya to taste it, she said it was the best cake she'd ever tasted. I didn't want to believe her, so Mamiya dragged Irako and Houshou over to taste the cake, and they all agreed that my cake was excellent. I thought they were trolling me, but they aren't the kind to troll me, so I had to take their word for it. Honestly, it's not like I used any cliched secret ingredient or did anything special.
But having their approval did make me feel a bit more secure about my uncertain cooking skills when the ship girls did return to base after their mission. Samidare, as usual, brought me the post-action mission report, and I told her to call Murakumo to my office. Samidare reminded me that I could just use the PA system, but I told her that I would rather keep this on the down-low. She gave me this wry little smile, asking me if I had gotten the cake. I told her that I made one, so Samidare leaves me with a smile and calls Murakumo to my office.
When Murakumo did come in, her head arrays were still bright red. A bit lighter of a hue of red, but still red nonetheless. She demanded what I wanted, that she be left alone, so I showed her the cake that I made for her. I told her that Samidare recommended that I do it to make Murakumo feel better. Murakumo just scowled at me and told me that it would take a whole lot more than just a cake to make her get over her anger towards me, if it even could. She said that something like that, yelling at her enough to make her cry wasn't going just slip by her with the help of some homemade cake. But I noticed that the red hue in her glowing head arrays was becoming less and less saturated over time, so that probably meant something, right?
I just walked up to her and shoved a forkful of cake into her mouth.
I watched for her reaction, not on her face, but on her head arrays, and just like I thought, the glows went straight from red to a vivid, fluctuating green. I guess the cake strat worked, so I gave her the rest of the cake.
Murakumo said that I shouldn't expect to get any preferential treatment from Murakumo just because of the cake, or that her little grudge against me was resolved. But she did say the cake was good. I told Murakumo that I would try not to yell at her again. It wasn't my intention to make her cry or to make her feel bad, but obviously it's hard to mean that when you make someone cry by yelling at them. I told her that the cake was my way of trying to make her feel better - not necessarily as an apology, because if you make someone cry by screaming at them for something you thought they did wrong, that's not something a stupid fucking "sorry", not even a cake, no matter how delicious, can resolve by itself. I told her that I didn't want us to all feel like enemies in the same base, and that I was willing to take steps to go back to us feeling like comrades at least again.
So that rounded out the night. But just this past hour I've been coughing nonstop, like every minute or so. Turns out walking out in the rain for nearly an hour and a half isn't good for your health.
Oh well. It's not like the ship girls would care.