8.6.2014
At breakfast today, which our friend Marco was able to join us for before his flight back home to Italy, he spoke to me and Gernot privately while the girls were distracted with our daughter trying to speak Italian. Marco revealed to us that after spending some time thinking, he is deciding that he will speak to the rest of his cabinet, the Council of Ministers, about the issue of the Abyssals and hopefully convince them that they are a serious enough terrorist threat to compel the Italian Parliament to take pre-emptive defensive action. He urged us to do the same, and when we lamented to him that we had already been doing so and that our efforts were in vain, he simply told us to try and try again.
"We all are very aware of all the terrorist attacks that have happened over the past decade beginning with the Al Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers in America," Marco said, "and we know what human terrorists are capable of. But from what I have deduced, we must assume that these Abyssals, because they are not human, are capable of committing terrorist attacks more destructive than any other we have seen. Either we must endure the hardship of implementing defensive measures where we can against them, or risk the possibility of falling victim to their schemes. If our precautions pay off, would that not make our troubles and efforts worth it?"
Gernot seemed to take particular inspiration from Marco's newfound conviction and promised that he, too, would do more of what he could. It would be a tough road, as we already know, but if Marco is right about one thing, it is that should the Abyssals grow to become a true international threat that they seem to have the potential to become, our precautions would pay off. Or, at the very least, the thoughts would.
After Marco departed for the airport, we were paid a visit by the two members of the American Seal Team Six who accompanied us at the H&K factory yesterday for U's debriefing, Herr Sanford and Herr Deimos. I noticed that when we let them into the house, the girls seemed a bit nervous at their presence, especially when the two Americans treated the girls like fellow comrades and friends. That was when I remembered that even though by technicality they are the true creators of these girls, they have never met before. This was the first time our girls have encountered their true creators face to face. More interestingly, neither Sanford nor Deimos even mentioned to them about their true identities as such, which I noticed and kept in my head as a question to ask them later. Why did they not introduce themselves as the girls' original engineers?
Regardless, their visit was brief, as seems to be the American business mentality, which I do not mind at all. They had two orders of business to talk to us about. The first regarded my earlier call with the head of the British MI-6 counter-intelligence agency, Sir Sinclair. Sanford revealed that Sir Sinclair had contacted Seal Team Six, as they are the rightful creators of our fleet personnel, and had requested that they try to reopen the possibility of a joint British-German fleet exercise program. Deimos asked Gernot and me why we did not accept the offer. If we were so insistent on giving our ship girls the training and combat experience that they so desperately need due to the lack of our own proper naval infrastructure, why was this not an obvious choice? Why were we so bent on flying our girls out to Japan when there was a neighbor literally right next door with the same resources as Japan yet has already stated their willingness to cooperate?
Because I was the one who handled that call, I spoke in lieu of my husband. I explained our sentiment that while it was undeniable that Japan was much harder to make contact with at the moment, we considered their resources to be much more valuable to our ship girls than those of Britain. Not only does Japan have their own entire fleet of ship girls that Herr Sanford and Herr Deimos and the rest of their team have created, but those same Japanese ship girls have actual combat experience against the Abyssals. This battle knowledge was what we wanted the most for our ship girls so that in the event that the Abyssals do become a global threat, our ship girls know how to fight them and defend our country.
But to my dismay, Herr Deimos deconstructed my argument. He had to point out to us that the political atmosphere of Japan at the moment was very anti-foreigner and heavily nationalistic due to the large right-wing majority in the Japanese Diet. This was not like old times, he said, when Germany and Japan were allies. This was a different time now, a time when Japan was rising to reclaim its former military power of its empire days and had no intention of receiving foreign aid to do so (although Herr Deimos did make a sarcastic point about how they, the Americans, had bestowed to them the gift of fleet personnel). He even mentioned that through their spies and secret informants inside Japanese political circles, the more extreme right-wingers in the Diet are now going so far as to bring up the old wartime concept of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a rather ostentatious title that refers to an Asian sphere of influence that covers all of south, southeast, and east Asia headed by none other than Japan itself. So given this political context, Herr Deimos decisively deduced that entrusting the ship girls to Japan under this climate was folly. He advised us to stop contacting the Japanese for this end, and should we ever receive a call from them asking to discuss terms for such a joint-exercise program like the one we had been trying to request from them, we ought to treat it with suspicion. The Japanese have no infrastructure capable of repairing their own ship girls, unlike us or the British; that is their one critically crippling weakness, is that they have no way to sustain their own fleet of ship girls. While we have teams dedicated to support our fleet personnel, because Seal Team Six had wholly produced the Moebius Four Platoon on their own with only civilian assistance from Japanese doctors and engineers, Japan has no official military or government resources to repair or maintain their own fleet. So if they ever do warm up to the idea of a joint fleet exercise with our ship girls, they may look to take advantage of it by "studying" our ship girls.
When I asked Herr Deimos what he meant by "studying", he said that he was referring to the structural study of German ship girls and learning about the secrets of fleet personnel by reverse-engineering. In other words, he suspected that the Japanese may resort to tricking other nations with ship girls, the only three other countries being us, Britain, and Italy, in order to strengthen their own fleet through various dubious means.
Gernot grimly remarked that Herr Deimos ought to run for office one day once his military days were over, for he talked and thought exactly like a cunning politician. Herr Deimos declined - he said that his way of thinking was more suited for military duties, not politics. Politics was not for him, as much as it might appear to be a shame for us as politicians to refrain from contributing his skills to the field.
"As you may already be aware, Japan is no longer a passive military force. As far as the American government is concerned, Japan will be treated as a neutral, volatile state. I foresee a possibility of a global condemnation of Japan's remilitarization movement if Japan commits to an aggressive armed response to the Abyssals - specifically, if Japan sees it fit to exert their own military presence in the territories and waters of other sovereign nations, then there will be a big problem. We're afraid that the Japanese government will soon take advantage of their claim to national defense and begin a covert operation of controlling and perhaps even eventually annexing foreign territories and waters," Herr Deimos said. He urged us, as the main political leaders of one of the most influential countries of the European Union, to advise other leaders of the EU to keep a close eye on Japan, and also their own borders and territories as well.
The second order of business regarded the rise of the NDP rallies in Germany, which we were surprised they were even aware of in the first place, for that didn't seem like something Seal Team Six would pay attention to, though I suppose this is the best covert operations unit in America we are talking about here. Herr Sanford claimed that the rise in these NDP rallies are in direct correlation with the rise of activities of the Advanced Administration terrorist organization in Europe. He stated that while they could not show any evidence at the moment to prove their suspicions, Herr Sanford cautioned us to take these rallies extremely seriously if we weren't already, because there was a good chance that the NDP was receiving weapons from the Advanced Administration. This took us by surprise, for we had received no such reports of the protesters being armed. All of the rallies were, if anything, in compliance with government laws regarding the free speech and expression, so we could not legally shut down those rallies. But they were by no means violent, although many noise complaints were issued by citizens disturbed by the rallies. The fact that the NDP is being funded by the Advanced Administration, therefore, came across as very disturbing. While our knowledge of the Advanced Administration is limited simply because of the fact that they have not committed any large-scale terrorist attack that would otherwise make their name infamous in the global community, Seal Team Six has given us enough information about them to make us regard them as very dangerous. So to know that they are deliberately trying to stir up trouble in our own country, as it would appear, is unacceptable.
"Then what ought we do?" Gernot asked the two Americans. "Be as it may, without evidence, we cannot convince the Bundestag to outlaw the NDP rallies."
Herr Deimos and Herr Sanford advised us to remain patient for now. They would work closely with local German police forces around the sites of the NDP rallies that have occurred, and they themselves were about to undertake a classified mission in the near future to investigate Advanced Administration activities within Germany. Should their mission prove successful, they should be able to produce sufficient evidence to give us so that we may present it before the Bundestag and put an end to the NDP rallies and perhaps even outlaw the National Democratic Party itself. In the meantime, we ought to reopen negotiations with Sir Sinclair and accept his offer of a joint fleet-personnel exercise program; that was their recommendation. Should we accept, they would have their fellow members in the Seal Team Six unit send over field data drawn from their interactions with the Moebius Four Platoon when they were sent to America for repairs and reconstruction, data that would prove crucial to the training of the ship girls. And with that, they left promptly.
Gernot didn't know what to say after that. Given what we know and what our wishes for our fleet personnel are, it would seem that going against their advice is foolish. Perhaps we ourselves were being driven by the orders of this American team, but throughout all our collaboration and cooperation with them, not once have we felt like they were trying to exploit us in some way, which is strange to say about an American entity. Gernot asked that I re-negotiate terms with Sir Sinclair tomorrow morning and see what we could do for our ship girls, so I agreed, and we informed our girls, including the Italian girls, of our intentions. Gernot then proceeded to call our good friend Marco once he landed back in Rome if he could extend the Italian ship girls' stay here in Germany to participate in a joint-fleet exercise with the British naval personnel, which he allowed for one week.
When Herr Sanford and Herr Deimos left, U asked us who those men were. Imagine the girls' reactions when I informed them that they were two of the people responsible for the creation of all ship girls.