17.6.2014
As we were waiting for both Jollenbeck's team and the BfV under Commander Manstein's command to report back with hopefully some solid findings on our current problems, the rest of the day today was filled with the usual daily agenda of what the chancellor's wife does in her office in the Reichstag. It would have been a perfectly ordinary day...how do the Americans say, "just another day at the office"...until I received an urgent call from Frau Losira, one of the members of Seal Team Six I have yet to meet in person, but I do recall speaking with her once or twice in the past, during the first few days of the Wunderwaffe's inception. I could tell the call was urgent because I received the call on my phone while I was driving back home with Retia in the backseat. It is one of my few pet peeves to receive a phone call in the middle of driving, especially driving back home, because I am driving back home for a reason. I am not driving back to home to go back to work, I am driving back home to relax and unwind after a long day at the office. The last thing I need is to have yet another phone call that is most likely about something extremely trivial (like a phone call from a security officer reporting ten minutes after I had left the Reichstag that a few tourists had littered near the Platz der Republik.
I can tell I am getting off tangent. I shall stop.
Point being, I do not like answering my phone in the car. It is already against federal law to do so anyway, but I, being the wife of the chancellor and an important member of the Bundestag, can always use my political status as a waiver, and the police officers will overlook it. But it is more of said personal pet peeve rather than respectful observance of the law that I do not answer my phone, and instead wait until I am home to return the call. In any case, I knew this call was urgent because unlike 94% of the phone calls I receive while driving, whoever was calling me kept calling back...four times, to be exact. I was practically listening to my ringtone (thankfully I am tech-savvy enough to know how to customize my ringtone, I am not that old) the entire drive back home. I could feel Retia's curious eyes stare into my forehead via the rearview mirror. Something tells me that she was also getting rather curious as to why this strange sound was playing over and over.
Once I parked my car inside the garage, I answered the phone right away. I was very tempted to simply yell into the phone in very angry German, but I refrained for the sake of being a model mother in front of my baby daughter, and it was Frau Losira. She expressed relief that I was able to answer; had I not answered the moment I shut off my car engine, she was going to simply send me an email instead, or even fly to Germany herself. Sometimes the freedom that special operatives have scares me.
Frau Losira explained to me that yesterday, they had received a few of the ship girls who were from the Moebius Four Platoon, the original fleet of Japanese ship girls they had constructed before their ownership was claimed and confiscated from them by the Japanese government. Two destroyer girls made an extremely dangerous voyage across the entire Pacific Ocean in an attempt to make contact with them at one of their bases in southern California, all the way from the Japanese province of Chiba. The very thought still has not yet ceased to amaze me. If these Japanese destroyers are anything like Max and Lebe, then that would be like our own German destroyers sailing from Cuxhaven to the coast of Brazil. I would never order them to undertake in such a task...my first reaction was that the Japanese Platoon must be in dire straits for them to send two of their own precious ship girls across an entire ocean like that simply to communicate with their developers.
But that was not all. They had a companion with them, but it was no ordinary companion. They had managed to procure the assistance of an Abyssal ship girl herself, and together, they successfully completed the journey, but Frau Losira said that their journey was fraught with hardship and pain, though she spared me the details. As one should expect of a voyage like that. I would worry myself sick or even to death should Max and Lebe do the same...
It appears that the Japanese fleet, more accurately the Platoon, has no means of sustaining itself. I have a feeling I mentioned this in one of my earlier journal entries, so this may be redundant: after the Japanese wrested control of the Moebius Four Platoon away from Seal Team Six, the JMSDF naval committee, consisting of all the top admirals and naval officers who presided over the operations of both the JMSDF and the Platoon, realized that by doing this, they could no longer turn to the developers for maintenance and repair whenever their Platoon needed it. And because the Platoon would be instrumental in fighting the Abyssal threat, having the Platoon but with no way to sustain it was quickly turning the Platoon into more of a liability than a powerful military asset. The incident that Seal Team Six had notified me of twelve days ago was the catalyst for that dangerous mission of those three ship girls, because several Japanese ship girls had been killed in action in that surprise attack, and they had no way of repairing them. According to the ship girls' testimony, the admirals on the naval committee of the JMSDF ultimately decided that sending two of their ship girls to make contact again with Seal Team Six was the best course of action. Although it was apparently mentioned that Japanese scientists and personnel are currently trying to reverse engineer the technology behind the ship girls in order to understand how to repair them, the admirals correctly guessed that simply trying to consult the original developers of the Platoon would be more worthwhile than wasting an unknown amount of time trying to figure it all out by themselves. Frau Losira laughed at this point, because she said that it was humanly impossible to reverse-engineer the technology behind their Platoon. Our Wunderwaffe team has found this out the hard way as well - quite a few of our own scientists had tried this and have since given up, it was just that complicated.
While this was all very interesting, I asked Frau Losira why she was telling me all this. Was there a point to me knowing this? Was Frau Losira simply showing me courtesy by giving me inside information about other ship girls around the world, or was there something that I was supposed to do here?
She replied that despite the still healthy relationship that exists between Seal Team Six and their Platoon, it needed to still be noted that due to the worsening of Japano-American relations, technically they must regard each other as political enemies. Frau Losira mentioned that there was a chance that the team may actually call in the three ship girls in their current custody and order them to defect from the JMSDF. After all, the Platoon is still configured so that Seal Team Six's orders take highest priority, thus the girls will obey them over anybody else. This possibility is in discussion, according to Frau Losira, and the team is still yet undecided. However, should they eventually decide to keep the girls and order them not to return to Japan, there will also be a possibility of those three particular Japanese ship girls being flown out here to Germany to stay with us in our home for a short period of time. The presence of Japanese ship girls being harbored inside a secret American research base would cause unrest in the chains of American military command should they be discovered, and the team would need time to explain the situation to their superiors in Third Echelon, so until then they would need a safe place to stay, preferably somewhere outside of America and kept out of the public eye. And because of my involvement in the Wunderwaffe branch, Frau Losira said that they would have to rely on me and my family to take care of them, if we could. If we were not comfortable, she said it would be alright, that they could simply look for another safehouse in which to shelter those girls.
I offered my home anyway. I would be lying if I try to claim that I am not interested in meeting these Japanese ship girls. Having met and incorporated our fellow German ship girls into our family, I feel rather tempted to make my acquaintance with the first ship girls the team had constructed. Certainly it would be very interesting to be able to interact with young women from another culture and country, let alone ship girls. Plus, I being a politician, perhaps I can speak with them in regards to the political atmosphere and environment currently brewing in Japan to receive some insight and better understand what is going on there.
On the topic of ship girls, I asked if Frau Losira and the rest of the team were being kept up to date with the training program currently being held at Rosyth Dockyards in England at the moment, and she said yes. The team's acting branch in England, the Royal team (the British counterpart to our Wunderwaffe team), was sending them daily reports of the regimen so that they could make sure nothing was awry. Frau Losira also mentioned that one of the Japanese ship girls whom they received had recently been promoted to the impressive rank of Second Lieutenant in the JMSDF, an unprecedented event, for this was the first time a ship girl had been given rank and uniform, something the developers themselves had not expected to have happen, given the Japanese government's nearly imperialistic militarism recently. Therefore, there was also a chance that should the team decide to keep those girls, they could also instead send them over to Rosyth Dockyards to help train both the Royal Girls and our own Wunderwaffe Girls. When I expressed initial doubt about how far simply the merit of rank would go in terms of their training expertise, Frau Losira responded swiftly by saying that these particular ship girls were veterans. One of them, named Samidare (very confusing to pronounce with German linguistic tendencies), was the Lieutenant, and she had been one of the first five ship girls assigned to the original Platoon at that base in Okinawa, so she has been serving ever since the beginning, apparently. The second, named Shigure (also very confusing to pronounce as a German), was by far one of the strongest ship girls they had ever built and was also a seasoned veteran. And the third, named Harusame (all these Japanese names...so difficult to pronounce properly!), was the ship girl who had been "Abyssalized" and recently reverted and was also apparently quite strong, although Frau Losira did not go into detail. These three could very well lead the training program if the team so chose, but time would tell.
Finally, before we ended the call, to my surprise, Frau Losira asked me how my baby daughter Losira was doing. Taken back by this suddenly personal question, I automatically replied that she was doing well, a bit robotically, without thinking. I quickly followed my answer up with a question of why she wanted to know. Frau Losira giggled and said that she, too, had a baby boy she and her fiance, who in fact was Herr Deimos, her fellow teammate on Seal Team Six, were also raising. Because they never mentioned anything about having a baby like myself, I couldn't help but express my surprise vocally and gave her a two-year-belated congratulations, as it seems that Frau Losira's and Herr Deimos's baby boy, named Damon, is now two years old. Frau Losira thanked me and said that perhaps, in a more peaceful and less stressful time, we could perhaps introduce our babies to each other.
"I'm sorry if I sound like I'm being a bit too friendly," she apologized, "but after thinkin' a little, I think that the two of us aren't so different. We're both tryin'a raise kids when we probably shouldn't be."
I knew what she meant. I think Frau Losira and I could be very good friends, should we spend some more time getting to know one another.