AN: The call of the Omakes continues! Yeah, it's not a main chapter yet, but this one forced its way into my brain first, so here you go!

"Alright, so… Who was arguably the best ship in your fleet?"

Leviathan and Umbra both looked at Maya as she brought up such a bold question. It was one of those nights where several of the off-duty ship-girls decided to 'get closer to their people' by having a night out. Tonight's choice of event was following several of the infamous 'Chuuni Brigade' to a restaurant that Houshou had recommended just off base with private rooms and a wet bar. Karaoke HAD been tabled, but was vetoed on the basis that since Leviathan and Umbra were (supposedly) from some far flung future that they wouldn't know any of the songs, and the place wouldn't have any UNSC favorites on hand either. Another suggestion was an old fashioned drinking contest, but as most of them would require several bars worth of drinks to make that happen and they didn't have an unlimited budget (and Levi refused to let Umbra go and rob a bank to fund said trip either, though of course they did not tell the other girls that), that wasn't going to happen tonight either. As a result, it came down to story swapping and casual dick-measuring. Tenryuu, Maya, Kiso, Chester, Leviathan, and Umbra were all present and had ordered their food when Maya spoke up.

"The BEST ship? Going to have to narrow that one down hon, there is a LOT of criteria to that one," Levi said as she swirled a cup of cherry rum in one hand.

"I'll concur there. Are we talking most firepower, most successful missions, or overall 'hype', as you say? There are quite a few with good reputations after all…"

Tenryuu rolled her visible eye at that and pointed at the prowler with her sake bottle. "Take your pic! This is all about hearing your opinions afterall, and we don't really know much to say yay or nay on it."

"That's true, I suppose," Levi acknowledged with a sip. "Hmmmm, let's see. Alright, let's pick two categories to start with then. Which do you want to hear first, best design, or best kill count?"

"How about something more concrete to start? Who had the best overall record?" Chester said with a grin.

"Oho? Well, if we did that, I'd have to say Advocate was the best, hands down," Umbra replied, grabbing a bottle of vodka and pouring herself a glass.

"Advocate?" Tenryuu asked as Levi rolled her own eyes. "Sounds like an odd name for one of yours. What's her story?"

Levi smirked a bit at the question. "UNSC Advocate was another Marathon class cruiser, would have been one of my sister ships if circumstances had allowed, but… well, in any case, she stands as the only UNSC ship with an absolutely, spotlessly perfect service record."

"'Would have been'? How does that happen? Either you're a sister ship of the class, or you're not, right? Or did they go and alter her post-design or the like?" Kiso asked, only for Umbra to chuckle.

"That's because she technically doesn't exist. She's an ONI ship."

"Wait, they took a cruiser and turned her into a corvette?! What the hell happened to cause THAT kind of downgrade?"

"It wasn't a downgrade. Technically, she was never built."

All four of the wet-navy ships looked at their space-faring counterparts incredulously. "What?"

Levi slugged back the last of her rum before leaning forward to pour another glass. "You know how my hull number is 684? Well, that therefore would obviously mean that there's a hull number 666 as well. And as you probably know, sailors can be superstitious bastards." As the others all gave a chuckle or snort at that, Levi continued. "As a result, when it came time to design her, everyone knew that it was unlikely that anyone was going to commission a ship with that number, or if they did, that anyone would feel good crewing her. So, when they drew her up, they just went with a stock design without any real bells and whistles. Basically just a cookie cutter setup with a handful of changes to the name-ship's blueprints to account for more recent innovations. Once they were done with it, they put it on a shelf and essentially forgot about it."

Umbra leaned forward conspiratorially at this point. "Of course, we over in Naval Intelligence loath to let an opportunity pass us by like that, so… When some adventurous little desk jockey heard that a ship was getting sidelined, he had the bright idea of purloining it for the Prowler Corps. Now, I don't know WHO exactly it was that came up with the idea…"

"Bullshit," Levi said amidst false coughs.

"Buuuut, they managed to talk his superiors into grabbing up the plans and seeing if the Navy would let us have her. Now, I don't know if it was the Admirals having a game of Hot Potato with the responsibility of making the decision, but for better or for worse, ONI had the Navy's permission to own their very own cruiser!"

"How the HELL did that work without someone screaming their heads off? I can't imagine that just anyone would let an intelligence branch have a front-line ship like that, what kind of backroom politics allows THAT?" Tenryuu asked in horror.

"Capitalism," Levi said nonchalantly. "We Marathons are damn good at what we do, and one of the most cost-effective ships ever built, but we were still fuck-off expensive to make. Most of us have 'sponsor companies' which put in money for our construction, with the caveat that each one that does so gets to throw a name into the hat for what the ship will be named, barring the commanding officer's veto. It was actually kind of surprising that ONI was willing to foot the bill for a cruiser from the Navy, but…" The blue-haired woman shrugged.

"But… but… How?" Tenryuu stammered, only to be halted by Chester.

"Wait, you said she wasn't built though?" the American ship said to Umbra's increasingly Cheshire grin.

"Indeed. Materials were collected, crew trained, supplies gathered and a dock was booked for her…. Only for all of it to be siphoned off to other projects and other ships that needed it."

"Hold up… This is sounding a lot like a setup for some very shady bullshit here. Why the hell are you so carefree about this?" Maya said as she turned to Leviathan.

"That's because the projects all of those resources were funneled to, were under NavSpecWep and other ships that needed massive refits. We were still thinking that the Innies were going to be our biggest problem at the time, and so we wanted to make sure that our ships were good to go as fast as possible. Taking the resources to build one ship and using them to modernize twelve others instead was considered a good way to speed things up, while also solving the issue of an unfortunate hull number."

"Of course, that wasn't ALL we did," Umbra said, her pearly teeth gleaming as the door opened to let the waitress inside with a trolley containing the assembled ship-girls' food. Once everyone was served, Kiso having a massive bowl full of beef udon, while Tenryuu had a plate of gyoza and mixed vegetables. Maya had ordered some curry rice and tempura, while Chester was looking at her yakisoba like she was trying to decide if she should eat it like spaghetti or not. Levi had chosen tonkatsu and miso, while Umbra had decided to try some sukiyaki. Once everyone had gotten their drinks refilled and tried their first few bites of food, Chester prompted Umba to continue her story.

"Alright then. Well, we'd gone and moved around all the personnel and resources that we had, but we were still holding the rights to a whole ship, so we decided to use the empty placement for a number of missions designed to draw out any Insurrectionist-backed anti-shipping operations, or just pirates in general."

"How did you do that?"

"Essentially? We just said that we built her and then had the navy issue orders that the newly dubbed 'UNSC Advocate' would undertake escort missions for colony relief convoys and exploratory deployments. The latter would explain why so few ever saw her, while the former… well…"

This time it was Levi's turn to grin. "Sometimes deployment orders would be deliberately leaked in order to see where the hole was, and oftentimes those who were looking to bag themselves an easy raid would find themselves with a brand new hole in their ship courtesy of a MAC round!"

Kiso blinked. "Wait, you're telling me you essentially made a ghost ship, that spent its days buzzing around doing essentially nothing, while those that were going after her were ambushed? How does that make her the best?"

"What do you mean? Someone had to have shot up those pirates that were found drifting afterwards, and there were no other ships in the area…"

Tenryuu narrowed her eyes at the red-eyed prowler "... Are you seriously telling me that you have a Flying Dutchman at your disposal? I mean, I get that we're all essentially 'ghost' ships, but seriously, you had someone there to do the deed instead of her, right?"

Both UNSC ships gave a 'who, me?' look at the eye-patched cruiser before speaking up. "Now why would you say that? After all, the convoys Advocate were escorting DID always make it to their destinations, and the pirates who were apprehended had to have been fighting SOMEONE..."

"Indeed, it's not like we'd have a battle group just wandering about off record or anything," Levi said with a grin. "So of course it had to be her! Advocate has been credited with no less than 35 escort missions, all of which were exactly on time, and with little to no difficulty. Why, if you read the reports at each stop, she even got through all of those missions without so much as a scratch! You might even say…"

Chester's eyes went wide. "No, don't say it!"

"That she had the Devil's Luck!" Umbra finished for her comrade, resulting in a series of groans coming from their audience. As the prowler preened at the response, Levi just shook her head and dug into her food.