Friday, February 7th, 2014.
Uh, so remember in yesterday's entry that I mentioned that weird late email from HQ regarding something like an emergency shipment of supplies? Those came in this morning. Usually, when we receive supplies, a few helicopters from the mainland come in and land at the Six-Pack (that heli landing yard that looks like a six-pack of beer from above because of how the white helicopter landing circles are positioned) and drop off whatever they've got and leave right away.
Four ships of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force's Murasame-Class destroyers showed up at our docks: the JDS Murasame, the JDS Harumsame, the JDS Yuudachi, and the JDS Samidare. Our docks can actually accommodate a few full-size destroyers, but only the Samidare docked while the others waited out at sea. When I went out to see what the hell was going on, I was greeted by Commodore Tsuyoshi Sawatari, a visiting naval officer who's normally one of the commanders of the American defense auxiliary forces stationed in South Korea. He explained that because of the Abyssal threat and his position within the American government, he'd been temporarily reassigned to help train JMSDF navy personnel in ship-to-ship warfare and other aspects of naval warfare, should the situation against the Abyssal threat call for it. He apologized that their unexpected arrival, saying that this needed to have been kept secret from the Ministry of Defense. As far as they're concerned, they don't need to know that four of their destroyers just delivered a shipment to Okinawa.
Well, it's not like they would give a damn anyway, so long as there's an American there commanding the new naval personnel fleet.
But we didn't just receive standard supplies...
Yamato (大和), named after the ancient Yamato province of old. I'm pretty tall myself, around six feet, but Yamato is huge. She's easily six three or six four, maybe even taller. And hot damn, is she gorgeous. That long, sweeping brown hair though. When Commodore Sawatari introduced me to her and when she bowed to me, I felt like my pride as a man as melting inside. Well, knowing what I know about the old Yamato of the Imperial Japanese Navy, it would make sense that Yamato's really friggin' tall. But seriously speaking, she is without a doubt our single strongest ship girl on base. Looking at her equipment and specs, I think she might be the strongest ship girl produced from the Moebius Four Armament so far.
Oh, by the way, before I forget, she came carrying a huge anti-materiel rifle, and when I asked to see it, I nearly dropped it on my own feet because it was so fucking heavy. Yamato came equipped with a fucking Barrett XM109-A2 25mm anti-materiel rifle! What the fuck! And the terrifying thing's that she's actually trained to use it in naval combat! So on top of her huge 46cm cannons, she's personally armed with a 25mm rifle!? I had only heard murmurings of the Barrett corporation back in America doing trial runs on a new anti-materiel rifle, but back then, I had just ignored them, thinking that they were just putting some modifications on their existing fifty-caliber Barretts and slapping some A3 or A4 variant at the end. Yamato makes that thing look like a goddamn paperweight, by the way. Interestingly, she also has a little Oriental umbrella thing attached underneath the barrel of her XM109-A2, so she can walk around holding her rifle like an umbrella. Talk about an upgraded shotgun umbrella, which I've seen before, believe it or not, those things actually do exist. But a 25mm rifle umbrella? That's not just overkill, it's blatantly excessive. The umbrella thing does come off, though, thankfully, since it was kinda terrifying to see Yamato enter my office holding her rifle (that's fully loaded, just not chambered) and her umbrella popped open.
Akagi (赤城, or "Red Castle", which is a mountain in Gunma Prefecture), has also joined us here at Okinawa. Thank God for another standard carrier, now Souryuu no longer has to worry about being the only standard carrier we have and won't have to do all the heavy work when it comes to launching planes. She's pretty chill, kinda like Wakaba, in a way, but more friendly and has a mature demeanor. She was pretty excited to see Souryuu, who obviously was super happy to see Akagi, and to see Houshou. Like I explained before, it seems like the carriers are all one big happy family, so that's good. With Akagi's arrival, we won't have to worry about being lacking in air power as much. We could do with a few more, but Akagi will definitely help us out a lot, since she by herself doubles our air power.
I-401 has also joined us. Not surprisingly, she's also in a swimsuit, but she's got quite the tan that she said she got from training extensively back in the mainland. She said that she felt that she hadn't fulfilled her purpose in her previous incarnation and wanted to do all that she could in this life so that she'd be useful. Later on, since I was curious what she meant by that, I searched up the old IJN I-401, and apparently I-401 was built in the last year of the war and thus didn't really see much action in combat or even get to reach her intended target destination, which was the Panama Canal. So I guess that explains why she's so motivated. That's good, motivation's a good thing to have, something everyone needs after how that capture mission went. Like Imuya before her, she wants me to call her Shioi, which is how you say her name by her number designation. I wonder why she isn't that tall, though. She's definitely taller than Imuya, but according to the Internet Shioi was the largest submarine constructed at the time, but it's not like I'm getting that kind of a feeling from her like I do with Yamato.
I didn't believe it when I saw them.
Ooi and Imuya came back.
They explained that they had been the first test subjects of some secret project called the "Kai" Program. They said they didn't know very many details about it, but whatever it did, not only did it bring them back to life somehow, but it reconstructed them to become stronger, both in terms of taking damage and dealing damage back. Ooi visibly changed - her uniform got a darker shade of green, and she came with double quad-oxygen torpedo launchers in her gearbox. She explained that it's because her role as a light cruiser's been changed - she's not just a light cruiser, but a torpedo light cruiser, just like those enemy torpedo light cruisers, to supplement our fleet's torpedo power. Imuya, too, had lots of miniature torpedoes strapped onto her legs, a lot more than I think she was able to carry before.
I didn't even know how to react when I first saw them. At first, I thought that maybe they'd made entirely new copies of Ooi and Imuya, since I didn't expect them to be able to be revived like this. But no, they're the same Ooi and Imuya as before, just...upgraded, I guess, for lack of a better term.
So naturally the first thing I did when I saw Ooi and after speaking with them a bit was take her to the light cruisers' dorm. I told Ooi what had happened to Kitakami, and while Ooi expected that Kitakami would've been very sad after her death, she didn't expect Kitakami to have reacted so badly. We met Kiso along the way, who was just as equally shocked to see Ooi back alive again like I was and joined us to head over to the light cruiser's dorm.
Before heading into Kitakami's room, I told Kiso and Ooi to stay outside for just a moment before entering. As usual, I found Kitakami lying in bed. She hadn't shown herself since last morning, like I'd expected. I asked her if bringing Ooi back would help her get over her depression, and Kitakami said that killing herself would be more likely to bring about the same result. I told her that suicide wouldn't be necessary, and if it was, she'd already committed it. That being said, I brought Ooi and Kiso in, and they had their little reunion. I left them to that - someone like me has no place in a time like that.
Before leaving, Commodore Sawatari informed me to check my email. I asked him if he was responsible for that email I had received the other day that had no return address. He just gave me a little wry grin and told me that he didn't know anything about that email.
What a goddamn liar, and he knows it. Oh well, I appreciate his help regardless.
And sure enough, after introducing our new ship girls to the fleet (everyone was hyper excited to see Yamato, it seems everyone loves her), I returned to my office, and whaddya know, there's that email again, but this time, it does have a return address.
"You should have received our little care package this morning by our friend Commodore Sawatari, as he ought to have made himself known as. You're welcome in advance.
Assuming you're very confused as to this sudden turn of events, we 'convinced' the Bureau of Counter-Terrorism to deploy several of their strongest personnel to your base. We used some...'coercions'...to make this happen, but because of this, don't expect that we do this favor for you again. Make the most of the chance we've given you.
Regarding Ooi and I-168, yes, they're alive again, if you still can't believe it. We never mentioned this in the naval personnel overview report that was given to the governments of Japan and America, and hence to you as well, but ship girls can be revived. They're machines, after all - if they break, we can always fix them. But try not to let this happen again - repairing them from death is resource-heavy, and if they get sunk out at sea, don't expect us to construct them again from scratch. They're fucking expensive, might I remind you.
So in other words, if any of your girls do die, make sure to pick up their bodies, 'k?
You should've also noticed by now that both Ooi and I-168 have received upgrades to their firepower. This's the result of our prototype 'Kai' Program that we've developed after finishing the Moebius Four Armament. It basically makes the ship girls stronger, but since we didn't test out the surgeries necessary to do so, we were kind of at a standstill, since we didn't want to sacrifice a perfectly good ship girl in case the surgery didn't go as planned. Ooi's and I-168's deaths provided the subjects we needed to ensure the Kai Program's success, since if they failed, it's not like it's gonna make a difference to some ship girls who're already dead. But now, we have the capability of upgrading your ship girls, but like repairing them from death, the procedure's very expensive, so it's not something we can do all the time. We'll let you know when we can upgrade another ship girl when we've got the supplies necessary to pull it off.
With this, you should have no excuse to not capture a live Abyssal specimen for us. We've got a lot riding on the line here over at our end, and we've taken a gamble that taking drastic measures like this'll further our own plans. After all, random people don't just help you out of altruism in the military. Maybe you've already realized this - the sooner the better.
PS: That email you got from HQ, we tracked it because we were curious about what they told you. Seems like they forgot to include the 'ship girls' part.
-Seal Team 6"
As I thought, the Seal Team 6 boys were behind this. More specifically, given that last email, I bet it's Captain Liu who's writing these to me. If I ever meet the Seal Team Six boys, our first round of beers is on me.
In other news, Akashi performed the surgeries that Samidare and Fubuki needed to recover their missing limbs, and those took only a few hours total, since fixing on arms and legs and feet and hands are a lot easier to do anatomically than eyes are, obviously. I was going to make cakes for them too, but they insisted that I'd done enough for all of them, and instead, we all celebrated everyone's full recovery, the arrival of our new ship girls, and Ooi's and Imuya's revival. Inazuma and Samidare, who had been apparently on very friendly terms with Imuya and were greatly saddened by her death (obviously nowhere near the level of Kitakami-tier depression), both exploded in tears when they first reunited with Imuya, and it was hugs all around yet again.
It's almost like the bad aftertaste of that stupid capture mission's finally being washed away. But I bet it won't fully go away - or if it does, it'll come back again, just like anyone's bad breath.
Unfortunately for the ship girls, this prompted me to void the forced vacation state that I had imposed upon our base, which made everyone bummed out, but I gave everyone an extended weekend until next Tuesday, which's Japan's Kenkoku-Kiken no Hi, or National Foundation Day, but until then, everyone could relax. I was still going to order some drilling and training to get our new ship girls acquainted with our fleet.
I didn't really talk with anyone else today; after our little party in Shinsengumi (Yamato and Akagi were pleasantly surprised that I let Houshou build an izakaya right in the middle of the base), I left everyone alone to hang out with each other. Batsubyou seemed to sense that I wanted to give time to the girls, because when I went back to my office to send HQ an email informing them that I would redeploy the fleet next Wednesday after Foundation Day, he was curled up on my desk next to my keyboard and meowed at me as I sat down. He accompanied me over to my room, where I spent the rest of the night watching some backlogged anime and feeding Batsubyou some cat treats. Hopefully Error doesn't find out what I've been feeding the cat.