Friday, February 28th, 2014.

Just realized I got my dates wrong. Went back and changed them. Stupid me.

Seal Team Six sure is punctual. I woke up to Ooyodo waking me in my office, informing me that the same helicopter from before had come again, and the pilot and the co-pilot asked to see me. I got dressed quickly, and as we were walking out to the Six-Pack to greet the members of Seal Team Six, Ooyodo reprimanded me lightly for always leaving my office door unlocked. I said I stopped worrying about locking doors to my own room ever since I became an officer. Such things don't really bother me anymore.

To my pleasant surprise, Captain Liu and another young lady had flown in overnight to pick up the new Abyssal specimens I had notified them of by email last night. Captain Liu introduced the young lady who flew with him as Losira, and that he'd been the one mainly behind the address-less emails from Seal Team Six. There might be a few times when someone else on the team other than him would be doing email duty, but for the most part, it was going to be him. I brought the two of them into the base and over to the medbay, where we were keeping He-Class and the two Floating Fortresses, since the medbay has a secure lockdown feature in case of an emergency quarantine scenario, which I doubt we'd ever use besides locking up Abyssal prisoners. The medbay does prove to be a surprisingly good prison with it, though, hence why we even bother using the quarantine feature at all.

We put the Abyssal specimens in the cargo bay of the MV-22B Osprey, and to my bigger surprise, Captain Liu handed me a medium-sized protective weapons case full of augmentations. He said that there were a couple new ones they wanted to have my fleet test out and give feedback on, some more copies of the augmentations we'd received with Kitakami a few days before, and even a few improved versions of those original augmentations. But because of the new Abyssal specimens we captured, the team was going to focus back on researching the Abyssals again, so we couldn't expect them to be ready to provide us a steady supply of these things.

He also mentioned that since they were going to expect to be able to pull off the Kai operation again, he said that it'd be better if the next candidate for it just flew back with them now for the sake of efficient time and resource management, so I headed over to the light cruisers' dorm and woke up Kiso, explaining to her the sudden situation. She immediately got dressed and headed out with us to the Six-Pack, and I handed her off to Captain Liu.

Before he left, Captain Liu let me in on a government secret that only Seal Team Six knew about at the moment: they'd been feeding Third Echelon, an extremely covert branch of the American military that's directly involved with the politics of the American government and Seal Team Six's direct superior office, reports of the progress in the conflict against the Abyssal threat, thanks to my own reports to the Tokyo HQ and my own personal emails to Seal Team Six. This means that Third Echelon's the most up-to-date American military office in regards to the context surrounding the Abyssal situation, and according to Captain Liu, Third Echelon's expressed a very keen interest in developing a naval personnel fleet to represent America. And by "very keen", apparently, Captain Liu claims that Third Echelon's ready to dole out over fifty billion American dollars to get an American ship girl fleet started as soon as possible. While enticing, there's a few major hurdles that stand in the way of a possible American ship girl fleet.

First, the context of Moebius Four Armament Pact only describes and specifies a naval personnel fleet under the ownership, nationality, and sovereignty of Japan. What this means is that if there's ever a ship girl who's constructed who represents a different country entirely, that ship girl alone nullifies the existence of the entire Japanese fleet, because by then the Moebius Four Armament Pact will be entirely null and void. And if that happens and the Japanese government finds out, they're going to call foul play and kick me out of my post here in Okinawa, something that the American government doesn't want to let happen after all the concessions they've had to make in order to put me here in the first place.

Second, even if an American ship girl fleet becomes built, you can't keep that a secret from other nations forever. The Japanese fleet, too, isn't necessarily a big secret; most powerhouse nations in the world have an idea about what's going on with Japan and the whole Abyssal thing that's been going on. They know that it's only Japan who's supposed to have a fleet like this. However, if America builds its own ship girl fleet, then all of a sudden, other nations like China, Britain, France, Germany, and especially Russia will point their own fingers at America too and take that as an excuse to build their own ship girl fleets. It'll be hard, true, since technically speaking, only Japan and America possess the top-secret technology behind the design and construction of ship girls, but given enough time and espionage, nothing can last a well-kept secret. And once all the major powerhouse nations in the world have naval personnel fleets, then what? It'll be like the Cold War all over again, except now, it's not just the US and Russia with nukes, it's five or six or seven nations around the goddamn globe with highly mobile and efficient fleets comprised of what are essentially super-human android soldiers.

Perhaps most dangerous in my opinion is the fact that if an American ship girl fleet is made, like I've mentioned in the first point, the Moebius Four Armament Pact loses relevance. The context of the Pact basically defined the ship girls' existences as something like nuclear weapons: their production was to be strictly controlled, their existences and identities kept a sworn secret from the general public. Having another fleet on the other side of the world would not only double the chances of the secrets about ship girls getting leaked out to the public and causing scandals in both nations' governments and militaries (as in, people would be up in arms about why teenage girls were being forced to don heavy ship artillery weapons and fight in the high seas and wear scandalous "uniforms", like Takao's, for example), but also decrease the significance of the ship girls' existences in general. And what I mean by that is that once an American ship girl fleet's made, not only will I get kicked outta Okinawa and be sent back to the States, but production of the ship girls here in Japan may be ramped up dramatically. Again, I don't like to delve into politics, but this's likely because of the heavy right-wing nature of the Japanese government right now, and those right-wingers are gonna press for a military expansion, and it just so happens that ship girl construction is actually not that expensive, and they're very cost efficient compared to building an entire new missile destroyer or aircraft carrier. So when I'm Audi 5000 and someone else comes here to assume control, that new commander might recognize everything that's going on and come to realize that basically, because of this new, expanded supply of ship girls, he can basically do whatever he wants to the fleet here in Okinawa.

TL;DR: if an American ship girl fleet is ever constructed, the Japanese ship girls will have a much higher chance of becoming objectified and possibly abused in every possible sense of the word, because let's face it, humans are fucking evil.

So after that slightly unnerving discussion, I saluted Captain Liu, since he's one rank higher than me. He just laughed and returned my salute, telling me not to address him as "Captain Liu" but as "Big" instead. When I asked him why, he said it's because people always said he had big balls, even though he's Chinese American.

I'm not sure if that was meant to be an inside joke within the team or not, but okay.

After sending them off, I returned to my office for morning paperwork, but first, I checked out the weapons case filled with augmentations. It's like a little treasure trove - like playing DayZ Origins and finding the loot box after completing one of the side missions on the PDA, or finding the loot box in H1Z1 after finding one of those treasure letters. It's the first time in a long time that I felt legitimately giddy upon receiving something unexpected. Then again, that might just be the gamer in me giving me the jitters like I'm on some sort of hallucinogenic drug.

True to Big's word, the case contained two extra copies of the Automated Reloader augmentation and an extra copy of the Mjölnir Cell Reinforcement augmentation. No extra Waterfall Shield augmentation, though. Interesting.

Also contained in the case was an improved version of the Automated Reloader. I could tell immediately because while the normal augmentations' PDA tablets are black, the improved one's gold. It's called the Automated Reloader Mk. II (you can even call it the Automated Reloader Kai to keep in the same vein as the ship girls' Kai forms), and it improves weapon reload speed/weapon cooldown time from a 10% reduction and weapon turn speed to a full 20% reduction and weapon turn speed. Nothing but a straight improvement. I like it.

And then, the case contained three brand new augmentations, but there was only one of each.

One of the new augmentations is called the Targeting Jammer. This one is unique because while the other augmentations so far are either passive or active, the user can actually switch between an active and a passive mode. In passive mode, the Targeting Jammer seeks out lock-on signatures from enemy torpedoes inside a range of 300 meters and has about a one in four chance to successfully jam its lock-on signature and cause it to dud out and propel across the water until its fuel runs out or unless it hits something, but it won't explode. Basically, about a 25% chance to protect the user from incoming torpedoes. In its active mode, the user can seek out up to five torpedoes to jam within a 300 meter range, and the success rate so far, apparently, has been 100%, but there's a small disclaimer written in the augmentation's electronic description not to rely on this statistic just yet. But the catch is that once the active mode is popped, it can't be turned off. And once activated, it lasts for sixty seconds, or until five enemy torpedoes have been successfully jammed, and once its juice is spent, the augmentation will be on cooldown and is completely invalid for three hundred seconds - or five minutes. So basically, a ship girl using this augmentation can go into battle with this thing set on passive, and she can pop its active mode whenever she feels like she's about to get hit by torpedoes she can't dodge, and save herself or other ship girls, and then she's basically on her own for five minutes until its charge can come back.

The second new augmentation is called Psionic Scrambler. (Sounds like a mix between the Psionic Disruptor in Starcraft and the perk Scrambler from Modern Warfare 2. We're all just a bunch of lame gamers, I guess.) This augmentation capitalizes on the fact that the Abyssals seem to utilize brain-wave frequencies to both communicate to each other and to help them locate the ship girls and acquire them as targets, as demonstrated by the Abyssal destroyers that we'd captured and sent to Seal Team Six a while back. Therefore, Scrambler renders the user more difficult to be targeted by the Abyssals when they try to aim at her, and if the user gets close to an Abyssal enemy, that particular Abyssal or any other Abyssal, for that matter, within the Scrambler augmentation's area of effect will have trouble communicating with their Abyssal comrades and increase the chances of them being defeated, captured, or such. But the description specifically said that the extent to which this can work is hugely in debate, since it's only ever been tested out on the test destroyers back at Seal Team Six's base. What happens when Ta-Class or Re-Class comes along and they come into the range of the Scrambler, who knows what'll happen.

The third new augmentation is by the far the simplest, but the most interesting. It's called Silencer, and it does exactly what it sounds like. The user basically makes 50% less noise, no matter what she does: firing a weapon, boosting, surfing across the water, whatever, you name it, the noise that she makes is cut by half by the augmentation's sound-muting vortex that works like Murakumo's Waterfall Shield by creating a form of vacuum that prevents the carrying of sound through air molecules. So basically, whoever has this equipped can pull off stealthy shit in the middle of the day, and the enemy won't ever hear her coming or shooting so long as the user keeps her distance. Pretty awesome. The only downside to this is that it needs to be activated in order to work, and it only lasts for thirty seconds and has a cooldown of five minutes, just like the Targeting Jammer, and that's a pretty huge downside.

So now that we're done geeking out for the day, today's satellite photos from HQ indicated that there was a large contingency of Abyssal forces gathered north of Able Two - the largest we've seen by far. The most disturbing thing about it is that there's a completely new Abyssal form that we've never seen before at the center, seemingly giving orders to the rest of the Abyssal fleet. Initially, my plans were to send the fleet back down to Baker District and see what else the Abyssals were still doing down there, since there still seemed to be lots of Abyssal movement and activity in Baker District. But now that I saw that there was a big ol' Abyssal fleet sittin' right in the middle of Able District, and looking at their fleet composition, I think my fleet can take them on. So I gathered the fleet together and showed them the satellite photos. I asked them if they felt confident that they could successfully engage this fleet without incurring any heavy losses or damage, and the girls said yes. I told them about this new Abyssal enemy we've never seen before, and to be extremely careful when engaging her, since we don't know what she can do. She hasn't even been given a name yet, so we don't even know what to call her. When Kiyoshimo asked if they should try and capture this new Abyssal boss person, I said no, it wasn't worth having them go out there and risking their lives over. Once we have enough information about this new Abyssal life form and intel on what exactly it is and how powerful it is, then we can start thinking about a strategy to capture her alive and bringing her back to base so that we can send her over to Seal Team Six for study.

To prep for this mission, I handed out the new batch of augmentations I got from Big this morning. I gave the Psionic Scrambler to Akebono, because according to her battle behavior history, Akebono's always itching to get up and close and personal to the enemy, so giving her this augmentation'll prove just how well it'll perform. I warned Akebono that it still needed a lot of field testing, and that she must not rely on its effect too much. She just said "Alright, I get it, shitty Admiral!" as usual.

I gave the Targeting Jammer to Ooi with good reason. Because the Targeting Jammer operates on an area of effect basis and not on an individual user basis, Ooi can cover both herself and Kitakami with this augmentation and activate it in order to protect both herself and Kitakami if she's forced to. That, and having a strong defensive countermeasure like the Targeting Jammer gives them a defensive option to fall back on if they have to when they're normally so offensive-minded. We can't afford to have two of our highest damaging ship girls taking any damage if they don't need to, and by torpedoes, of all things.

I gave Takao and Hiei the extra Automated Reloader Mk. I copies, and I gave Yamato the improved Automated Reloader Mk. II. Now, Yamato's main 46cm cannons can fire a volley every 32 seconds from the original 40, which is insane, since she's basically firing almost as the same speed as Kirishima's and Hiei's cannons without the augmentation.

And finally, I gave the Silencer augmentation to Suzuya, since like Akebono and the more aggressive destroyers, Suzuya loves to be up in the front lines shooting things. Because she's a heavy cruiser, and because Kitakami and Ooi already have augmentations of their own and can't carry any more, Suzuya was the obvious choice to equip the Silencer, since she can pack quite an opening punch without being heard at all and give our fleet an even deadlier opening strike potential. Suzuya, who'd been envious of the girls who received augmentations last time, literally tackled me to the ground with one of her monstrous bear hugs, saying that she'd promise she'd bring home that new freaky Abyssal enemy person or whatever. I said that while that'd be nice, I would prefer her to focus keeping herself and the rest of the fleet alive rather than trying to do anything for glory and honor.

So with the fleet newly equipped, I made Souryuu the flagship and deployed them. The plan was to scout out Able District with planes from the carriers, and after locating the Abyssal fleet, Suzuya was to coordinate a lethal first strike with Kitakami, Ooi, and the submarines by having Suzuya dump as many rounds downrange as she could while silenced, and after her first rounds hit, the others were to launch their torpedoes at the Abyssal fleet, and let the rest of the fleet engage with them.

But right now, it's 2157 hours, and there's still no sign of the fleet returning. I'm sitting here in bed waiting for them to come back, but I'm getting sleepy.

I would much rather stay awake and hear the bad news instead of waking up to hear them. That's just my personal preference.