Wednesday, February 26th, 2014.
I had to yell at Akagi this morning for demolishing all three lemon drizzle cakes that I made for Inazuma's birthday party yesterday. The girls had told me that they wanted to save the third cake for later, and I'd put it in the oven to keep it warm, but Akagi found it earlier this morning before breakfast and plowed through almost a quarter of it. I suspect she would've eaten the whole damn thing if I didn't find her fishing around in there.
Goddamn it, Akagi.
And so because of that, today's breakfast time was nothing but me dealing with some of the destroyers' bitching about Akagi and the cake. I had Akagi apologize, but as soon as she did, she said "But it was super delicious!" and her apology didn't seem so sincere anymore, so I whacked her on the head with a karate chop. In the end, I assured that I'd make another lemon drizzle cake tonight as dessert after dinner. Wwe need to use up the rest of the ingredients anyway, 'cause Mamiya and Irako don't really have any reason to use some of them, so I may as well get rid of them as soon as possible so that they can dispose of the waste.
For today's emails, I finally received an answer from HQ regarding my request for Inazuma's ship sisters. They said they couldn't send them. So I sent them a reply, asking them why not. Though, I feel like they won't get around to answering that for another god knows how many days or weeks.
Another email from Seal Team Six.
"We've received the feedback reports your ship girls wrote up on our prototype augmentations. Thanks for that, having direct battlefield results goes a long way to helping us fine-tune these things and hammer out the chinks in the armor, so to speak. We've read them up already, and we're gonna work on perfecting them. Make sure to send us any more intel about those augmentations if the girls have anything else they wanna add. Any intel is good intel.
We've taken the liberty to study the Abyssal destroyers a bit more. Some of our team members have been observing them for quite some time, and they've reported that the destroyers have a telepathic kind of communication with one another, judging by their behavior. Sometimes they do choose to speak, like I mentioned, saying 'kyuu' all the time, but it looks like they don't need to depend on spoken language to understand each other, anyway. If you're curious about what they sound like, there's a sound file attached that you can check out.
But one thing that we can guarantee you is that these Abyssal destroyers aren't set on death and destruction like the stereotypical bad guy in a good guy-bad guy action flick is. These guys don't seem like they really ever need to fight. They're perfectly fine chilling out and playing around. They've taken quite a liking to Lauren here at our research facility. So this could mean that these Abyssal personnel aren't born with the innate desire to end the world or anything devious like that. It's possible that they, too, are just another normal fleet. But we don't know for certain."
A normal fleet, huh. So like mine. That sounds...
terrible, I guess.
Because that would mean that I'm sending my fleet to go trash theirs.
Well, that's just what war's all about. There's always good guys and bad guys on every side of a conflict. Only the lucky ones survive, after all.
Anyways, I'm too tired to be writing about sentimental shit. Tired tonight, and I'll explain why.
After reading the email from Seal Team Six, I sent them a reply email about the whole situation regarding Inazuma and her ship sisters. I informed them of my intention to bring Inazuma her ship sisters from the mainland as her present for White Day, since Inazuma had given me the best chocolates out of everyone at base. I don't know why I should recruit their help with this matter, but I'm sure they can do certain things that I can only dream of.
For today's mission, I decided to take a risk and send the fleet back down to Alpha Four, like I had originally intended to do last Monday, the day I got shot. I called the fleet together and informed them about my intention to send them back to Alpha District to investigate and see what's going on at Alpha Four. I said that because the Abyssal fleet had ample time to rebuild and recover their grip over Alpha District, this would be a very risky and potentially very dangerous move. However, I justified my reasoning by stating that precisely because this was an unsafe move, the Abyssals might not expect the fleet to head straight for Alpha Four. The vast majority of the girls agreed to the plan, and the fleet decided to head out to Alpha Four. I warned them that this could be really dangerous, that some of them may be coming back with heavy damage if they were sure to accept this. I had expected a lot of the fleet to disagree with me, actually, but that wasn't the case. I warned them that they could've been showing an unhealthy amount of confidence, but they dismissed my worries. Besides, with Super Kitakami-sama, how could they lose?
So I sent them off to Alpha Four. Initially, I wanted to send Houshou with them too, just in case. But the carriers, especially Akagi, insisted that Houshou stay behind at base. They really didn't want her to get hurt, it seems. Houshou certainly is the beloved motherly figure around these parts.
My wounds are starting to accelerate in terms of healing speed, since Mamiya, Irako, and the girls have been constantly bringing me warm tea and lots of healthy snacks for me to eat. I've been forcing myself to eat them knowing that they'll help my body recover faster, and even though it's been difficult forcing myself to fight my terrible appetite, it's paying off. So after sending the fleet off on sortie, I went back to my office to nap until the fleet came back. I asked Mamiya and Irako to wake me up when the fleet came back, or even better, tell Error to come to my room and wake me up when the fleet returned.
I found Error waking me up urgently. As soon as I saw her face, I knew something bad happened with the fleet and pulled on my coat to head out to the pier, expecting the worst and feeling like I never should've sent them on such a dangerous mission so needlessly. I know that sometimes, I say that feeling regret is the same thing as wasting your time, but if you get other people hurt because of what you've done, what else do you feel but regret?
Luckily, it wasn't as bad as I was fearing. No one died or sank, but lots of the girls ended up with heavy damage. Nothing gruesome or gut-wrenching, like Inazuma's eyes getting shot out or something, but enough damage to send those with heavy damage to the medbay first before the docks.
Akagi, Souryuu, Shouhou, Yamato, Kirishima, Takao, Atago, Kitakami, Ooi, Kiyoshimo, Hatsuharu, Wakaba, Akebono, and Inazuma all took heavy damage, while the rest took moderate or light damage. Basically, only Samidare somehow ended up with light damage when she got slapped in the face by Re-Class's tail and got a nosebleed from it. How that ended up happening, I have no clue, and I didn't bother asking.
So Akashi, Error, Mamiya, Irako, and Houshou and I spend a few hours in the medbay patching up the most heavily wounded girls first before sending them off to the docks. The reason for this's that we've covered up the heaviest and deepest wounds with thick gauze, so that when the girls go for a dip in the medbay docks, the dense concentration of nano-bots in the water don't sting like hell for the girls going in. Instead, it'll still sting, according to Akashi, but because of the thick gauze, the gauze'll soak up the bathwater and slowly filter the nano-bots through into the wound so the sting won't feel out of control, and the healing process can proceed steadily.
Kitakami was the flagship for today's mission, since she'd done a hell of a lot of work in the last major sortie, so I pulled her aside before she headed into the bath. Ooi was rather upset by this, since she was looking forward to taking a dip in the bath with Kitakami. Not surprising. But I asked Kitakami if she thought this mission was a good idea or a bad one. After all, the best kind of truth you can hope to get is the kind that people who hate you can tell about you.
Surprisingly, she said that the idea and reasoning behind the mission wasn't a bad one. In fact, had it turned out better, it would've been a brilliant idea, she said. However, she said that she'd just gotten unlucky once, and the mission kinda fell apart from there, and lots of the girls ended up getting heavy damage. She told me to go look at the post-action mission report she'd left at my door in front of my office to read more about it.
Before she turned to leave, she added,
"And by the way, please don't make me the flagship ever again. I'm not cut out to be the flagship. Sorry."
So in order to figure out what she meant by this, I went to my office, and sure enough, found the report in front of my door. I went inside to take a look at it.
Basically, when the battle first started, the fleet had the upper hand. The Abyssals, just like I'd hoped, definitely didn't expect my girls to come waltzing straight into Able Four and got completely wrecked - shrekt, if you will - by the battleships. Yamato single-handedly wiped the island's defensive lines with her cannons and her Barrett XM-109 25mm AMR. Going in was the easy part.
Getting out was a complete disaster.
This's where Kitakami's unluckiness that she mentioned came in. They investigated the island of Alpha Four - I'll explain what they found there after this - and after searching the place, Akagi's recon planes informed the fleet that they were soon going to be surrounded. The problem was, they detected that the incoming enemy forces trying to trap them at Alpha Four was divided into two major task forces. The fleet could take on either half of the incoming fleet, but not the entire enemy fleet at once. Kitakami, as flagship, decided to order the fleet to attack the half of the Abyssal fleet that had less aircraft so that her own fleet could maintain easy aerial superiority. Normally, that's sound strategy and good reasoning, nothing really glaringly wrong about that.
Until they realized that they were running into a fleet with an insane amount of enemy submarines. And because Kitakami had ordered the fleet into double-line formation and because the recon planes were too busy seeking out and keeping eyes over the main force of the Abyssal fleet they were about to fight, my fleet realized too late that they were about to be completely blindsided by the enemy submarines' unorthodox positioning in the water and consequently got ripped a new one by enemy torpedoes. And because lots of the girls took initial torpedo damage that they didn't need to have taken if the enemy submarines were detected in time, the battle was then made a lot harder to fight. Not to mention, Re-Class wanted revenge on Kitakami and Ooi, so she rampaged through too and complicated things.
But at least no one died or sank. Kitakami explicitly mentioned in her report that the mission itself was not the reason why the fleet came back in such bad shape; rather, the way the battle turned out just didn't go out as planned. It wasn't anyone's fault in particular, basically. She added that Akagi wanted to talk to me about what she learned about her augmentation soon, so I guess I'll talk to Akagi tomorrow morning about her augmentation.
Now, on to what they found at Able Four. The fleet determined that Able Four is a special research facility of some kind. But it wasn't like some stereotypical dingy, amateurish meth lab that rednecks and homemade drug dealers build in their backyards. This one was high tech as fuck, apparently. It just looked legit, and there were some photos that the ship girls snapped and saved to their memory files and printed out to give to Kitakami to include in the report. Looking at the photos, this research facility at Able Four really does seem super legit. I guess we now know why the Abyssals that time retreated to Able Four to protect it at all costs; something big was going on here.
But what is that "something"? And judging by the fact that the Abyssals, according to today's satellite photos from HQ, weren't still guarding Able Four like that, did they finish whatever they were doing there? Some of the photos that the girls took when they actually went up to the base and investigated some of the buildings inside certainly seem to suggest that something was being worked on there, but we don't know what or if it's actually done and running around. I guess we'll find out soon…and when we do, hopefully it won't end up as badly as this.
