Tuesday, February 25th, 2014.
Today's Inazuma's birthday. Or, as it's known here at base, her "launch day".
I asked Houshou earlier today during breakfast (I was feeling well enough to go have breakfast with the girls in the mess hall instead of having my meals delivered to my office for me) about ship girls' birthdays, since it occurred to me that ships technically have three birthdays: their ordering, their laying down, and their launching. So would it be necessary for me to have to keep track of all three of those dates for each ship girl?
Houshou told me not to worry. She likened it to the way humans are normally born: the ordering is akin to sexual intercourse (it's weird to think, but that's the closest you can get, I suppose), the laying down is the conception, and the launching is the actual moment that they're "born". We don't say that humans are born when they're conceived, they're born when they come out of the mother's womb. I suppose that makes sense. At least I won't have to juggle three birthdays for all of the ship girls. Like, that's just gonna be hell on earth for me by that point. Besides, what the hell's the point of a birthday when you have three of them in a single year?
So for the sake of Inazuma's surprise birthday party, I assigned the fleet a simple recon mission, to scout out Charlie District that's along the southern side of Sector B, which provides for one of the shorter travel times for the fleet. We don't have very much information about Charlie District yet, as HQ's satellites are busy at the moment keeping tabs over Able and Baker Districts, so I figured this'll be a good time to get a head start, given the context of today. Because of this, I only sent out a small portion of the fleet: Murakumo, Inazuma, Fubuki, Wakaba, Imuya, Shioi, Kitakami, Ooi, Yahagi, Suzuya, Kirishima, and Hiei were to escort the light carriers and standard carriers to Charlie District and protect them while the carriers launched recon planes and get a first-hand look inside the territory. While this's a rather mundane utility for the carriers' planes and honestly a bit of a waste of resources to sortie the carriers on a simple recon mission that the satellites can do just as well, this was more of an excuse, you can imagine, to distract Inazuma and get her away from the base while we set up the surprise birthday party inside Shinsengumi.
So right after I deployed the fleet, the rest of the fleet that stayed behind got to work. I bought some party decorations from my run over to the nearby town with Error and Batsubyou the cat, so Sazanami and Samidare worked with Yamato to hang those up. Yamato's huge height came in really handy since she can easily reach the top of the walls. Hatsuharu and Kiyoshimo assisted Mamiya, Irako, and Houshou with the table preparations and the foods that needed to be made and prepared before the party, the kinds of food that are better off being made the day of the party instead of being premade and stuck in the oven or fridge or whatever. Everyone else tidied up the izakaya and set the tables and set up the karaoke machine and the stereo speakers from my office and the mahjong table and all the other games that they've fished out, and with how many people we still had at base, despite having a good chunk of the fleet away on the recon mission, we turned Shinsengumi into a miniature Chuck-E-Cheese's before lunch.
After eating lunch, since there was a bit of time to kill as we waited for the recon squadron to return, I took care of paperwork and menial office stuff during that time. Nothing significant or noteworthy, thankfully, so I took the time to look over the reports that Murakumo, Kirishima, and Akagi made for me in regards to their augmentations' performance, in addition to Kirishima's post-action mission report.
Murakumo reported that the Waterfall Shield worked as intended, but she said that it'd be nice if the shield's vortex got increased to cover a larger space around her. Some of the incoming enemy shells fired at her, the larger caliber rounds, to be specific, still disoriented her because the speed at which she was moving about in combat, especially if she was boosting forward and she took a hit with the Shield active, essentially allows the explosion from the deflected round to still have a small window of opportunity to somehow pass through the vortex's range and affect her, as if the vortex has blind spots all over it. It's not lethal, so she said this wasn't an immediate danger about using the augmentation, but it's something that needs to be looked into. In addition, Murakumo noted that the augmentation, because of the way it works, is best used when she's going up against enemy fleets that have a few heavy-hitting enemies that deal tremendous damage with one or two shots. The Shield can easily deflect one or two shots in quick succession, and because of the time that it takes for the enemy formations to then reload and fire again, the Shield has much more than enough time to stabilize and reestablish. However, if she's going to go up against enemy formations that have lots of enemies, especially destroyers and other smaller-class vessels that fire quickly, the Shield is much less effective, since it just can't keep up with the sheer volume of incoming fire. She recommended that the Shield's utility be expanded to cover that particular weakness, otherwise it'll be more of a situational augmentation and have its full utility decreased significantly.
Kirishima reported that the Automated Reloader worked very well. (As it should, since literally all that augmentation is is a simple program that just optimizes weapon reloading speed. Simple and straightforward.) With it, she was able to much more effectively provide strong battleship fire for the forward destroyer squads who needed covering fire or heavy artillery to finish off an enemy, and she requested that not only she keep the augmentation, but also to provide it to all the battleships and heavy cruisers in the fleet. She said that if all of our bigger ship girls (not in terms of physical size, mind you, but their ship category) had Automated Reloader augmentations equipped, then our fleet's potential damage over time will jump at least twofold. She added that there really was no disadvantage to the Automated Reloader, which is good to hear.
Akagi reported that she didn't have as many opportunities to test the Mjölnir Cell Reinforcement as Murakumo or Kirishima did, considering her role in the fleet during yesterday's mission, but when an enemy dive bomber managed to break through the fleet's anti-air volleys and dived straight for her, she decided to tank the hit to see just how effective her augmentation was. She said that when she braced for the hit and when the bomb hit her, she barely felt it, and all the bomb did was rip her clothes away to expose her skin, and all she suffered was a bruise. No blood, no open wounds, just a simple bruise on her right shoulder. It was a large and nasty bruise, yeah, but that's a lot better than getting hit by a bomb and having an arm or a leg blown off, for sure. So Akagi said the augmentation truly is a great upgrade to have, but she did note that because she didn't take any more hits for the rest of the battle, she wasn't sure what would happen if she got hit by an attack that she wasn't expecting. The bomb she tanked did nowhere near as much damage, she felt, because she had specifically braced for it, and while she couldn't feel any difference with any part of her body when she braced for the attack, Akagi suspected that the augmentation may actually work much better if the user knows an attack is incoming and prepares to get hit by it beforehand. She recommended that I give this augmentation to another ship girl, preferably a destroyer or another ship girl who's constantly in the front lines and always prone to taking damage, and seeing how well the augmentation does for a ship girl like that.
Which reminds me, now that Akagi's brought it up: these external augmentations are contained within the form of a PDA tablet strapped securely onto the users' wrists or upper arms. I'd imagine that if they get hit by an enemy attack, they'd be destroyed. After all, they're just ordinary-looking tablets. I suppose I should remind the girls whenever I have them equip the augmentations to protect those tablets at all costs to prevent them from getting destroyed. Not only would they probably be really expensive to replace, but it might rob the girls of a potential advantage in combat that might save their lives. I get the feeling that they're built to last and be battle-sturdy, though. But we'll see.
As for the post-action mission report, Kirishima reported that they were able to successfully disrupt enemy transport routes and destroyed all the floating platforms they could. They made sure to put some distance between them and the floating platforms so that what happened to Wakaba wouldn't happen to anyone else (her wound's finally starting to heal up), and even though Re-Class showed up to the party, Kitakami and Ooi stopped her. Apparently, according to the two light cruisers, Re-Class didn't expect them to be so strong, so she ended up getting nailed by eight torpedoes in a row, thanks to Kitakami's Weapon Pre-Igniter internal augmentation. Ooi, too, dumped a good chunk of her torpedo payloads into Re-Class, and they fended her off by themselves. Reading that put a smile to my face. Re-Class can't just go Twitch Plays Pokemans on my fleet whenever she wants if she knows there're two light cruisers who can fuck her shit up now.
After compiling the report and preparing them in electronic file form so that I can send them to HQ and the augmentation feedback reports to Seal Team Six, I got a visit again from Kiso. She'd seen what her older ship sisters were capable of, now that they've been upgraded and Kitakami's got her super-powerful Weapon Pre-Igniter augmentation kicking some ass. In fact, Kiso added, so fiercely had Kitakami fought in yesterday's sortie that she was starting to become known as Super Kitakami-sama by a lot of the destroyers and light cruisers alike. Even Suzuya was starting to call Kitakami that too, and I know for a fact that Suzuya and Kitakami don't necessarily get along too well since Suzuya knows how Kitakami's treated me in the aftermath of Ooi's initial death.
Kiso basically confronted me and asked to be put into the Kai program as the next candidate as soon as possible. She didn't want to be left behind in the wake of her older ship sisters' escalating strength. She said she didn't care about the popularity or the prestige that Kitakami and Ooi've got now as torpedo light cruisers, it's the strength, the power, and the ability to "take the big shots", as she said, that she really wants.
It's around here that the gamer in me should start screaming, "THE PLAYS! THE PLAAAAAYYYSSS!"
But anyway, Kiso said that she'd watched Kitakami and Ooi shut Re-Class down hard. They'd crippled Re-Class so fast that Kiso's weapons didn't even have time to complete a full reload cycle before Re-Class decided to retreat. She said that she couldn't stand knowing that her ship sisters are capable of enormous firepower such as that, while she was just standing in the background being a side character. She, too, wanted to be in the spotlight. Not necessarily in terms of popularity, but in terms of battlefield influence. Kiso wanted to be feared by the enemy just as much as Re-Class is now probably scared of Kitakami and Ooi.
So I accepted Kiso's candidacy. I apologized to her that I couldn't get her to go with Kitakami last time, since Seal Team Six only had the resources to perform the Kai surgery on one ship girl. Kiso said that that's what she thought had happened, so she didn't say anything about it to me when Kitakami first left the base to get upgraded, but now that she saw what Kitakami was capable of, Kiso couldn't stand it anymore and came to talk to me. I told her that I would contact Seal Team Six and inform them that I have another ship girl who's volunteering for the Kai program, which was what I did after Kiso left my office. I sent the mission intel to HQ and to Seal Team Six, and to the latter, I also attached the augmentation feedback reports and the info that Kiso was to be the next ship girl to receive the Kai upgrade as the soonest possible moment.
Literally as soon as I hit the enter button to send the emails, Ooyodo burst into my office and announced that the fleet was already back from sortie, so I quickly put my laptop on sleep and hurried over to Shinsengumi with Ooyodo, and we hid inside the izakaya. The rest of the sortieing fleet, except for Inazuma, already knew what to do, since I had given them quiet instructions on what to do once they returned from their mission. They took the unsuspecting Inazuma to Shinsengumi, and as soon as they came inside, we flashed on the lights, popped the confetti throwers, and yelled "Banzai!"
Inazuma, who seriously didn't see this coming (she admitted later that she didn't even realize that her birthday was coming up, as I'd suspected), instantly realized what this was and just fell to her knees on the spot, bawling as loud as she could as the rest of us sang Happy Birthday in Japanese. We brought out the first big triple-decker glazed lemon drizzle cake I prepared yesterday that had eight candles on it (one candle for every ten years) and topped with a big ol' anchor, and Inazuma, seeing it, just threw herself into another fit of furious sobbing. It took her almost fifteen minutes to blow out the candles, since she was so preoccupied with crying. I don't even wanna mention the part when Samidare and Sazanami brought out the big teddy bear cosplaying as Thor to give to Inazuma. She nearly strangled Samidare and Sazanami with her hugs, since she lost control over her own strength.
The amount of vanilla in Shinsengumi at that moment was so thick in the air that you could literally taste the vanilla on your teeth. The one thing that would've just turned the entire atmosphere into a suffocating layer of vanilla was her ship sisters, but there's not much we could've done about that. HQ hasn't gotten back to me on that matter, so I can only hope they'll suffice as a White Day present.
We basically partied the entire day, which in retrospect might not be such a great idea, seeing that if the fleet here gets bigger, we might be celebrating birthdays every single week. But hey, it's hard for me to get mad or upset over it, since I certainly would've preferred that my own military life was like this the entire time. I had to leave early since I'm still recovering from my wounds and I wanna get a good night's sleep, but I had fun today, and we pulled off what we wanted to do for Inazuma, the birthday girl.
There isn't any reason why a soldier's life should be any different than any other life. Fight by day, relax by night. Obviously it can never be so cookie-cutter like this, but just for a little bit, I think it's okay.
