13.6.2014
We woke up early today to see our Wunderwaffe girls depart for England. Jollenbeck arrived to pick them up from our home in his military armored truck, one of the ones that resemble those armored trucks that carrier companies employ for civilian safekeeping and transportation of civilian valuables, something of that nature, so that civilians will not raise alarms about a suspicious military vehicle with mounted machine guns driving down the highway first thing in the morning when I went to work. Gernot, Retia, and I all bid them abschied, and Prinz Eugen and Lebe bid us a tearful reply as well. Bismarck, true to her nature, saluted us as she would do for a proper Admiral and thanked us deeply for our hospitality for them thus far, and that all them, especially herself, would work and train as hard as they could to make us proud. Not only us, but their fellow countrymen and country proud as well. For a joint training program that was only to last a mere two weeks, they sure took it quite seriously. As they ought to; this will be their first real sea-going experience, which they quite literally have had none of thus far since their construction. Max saluted us as well, and U, as expected, attempted to shake Retia's tiny hand by grasping it in between her thumb and fingers, but instead Retia gave her a smack on the forehead. U did not know what to make of this.
The Italian ship girls also bade us an emotional farewell as well, as they will return straight to Italy following a week of training at Rosyth Dockyards. Littorio professed that their time here was to be an unforgettable experience, living with other ship girls of a different nationality and thus learning what it must be like eating German cuisine and learning a bit of German themselves. Of course, this cultural exchange was mutual, for Libeccio had been teaching Max, Lebe, and U a few words of Italian (and had much dissonant fun in doing so when their attempted pronunciation of Italian quickly got out of hand). It is quite fortunate that everyone in our household happens to know and speak English fluently; both Gernot and I took our English studies quite seriously in grade school while growing up and perfected it in university, and the Wunderwaffe girls appear to be constructed with English preprogrammed in. Same goes for the Italians, I had deduced.
As though to mock Littorio, Retia waved at the Italian battleship and giggled loudly, causing Littorio's face to flush quite noticeably. Unable to help myself, I added to her extreme chagrin even further by adding that someday, I wished for her to have a daughter just as wonderful as Retia, and immediately Libeccio and Roma began to poke fun at Littorio in regards to this. I hope I did not make her too embarrassed.
Before departing, Jollenbeck gave me a special USB adapter that apparently has been specially crafted by the staff over at the Wunderwaffe labs, and he said that upon stopping by, the boys there wanted him to deliver this adapter to me. He also gave another one that looks identical to the one I received from him to Bismarck. He briefly explained that these adapters were special two-way communicators that used satellite broadband to allow us to communicate with the girls while they were in England in the midst of their training period. These communicators would operate on a very secret frequency and would be protected by the best online security measures currently available, meaning that every evening, the girls could call me on my laptop and vice versa if we ever needed to speak to one another. Had the team in the labs had more time, they would have also taken the extra step to convert these adapters into earpieces so that we could instantly communicate with one another at any time, a prospect that may come in handy in the future. But for now, we shall settle for this. Bismarck promised us that she and the rest of the girls would contact us regularly to report on their activities, despite our insistence that they ought to simply try to concentrate all their efforts in training and not always have to worry about us.
"But - but now that we will not be here for the next two weeks, who will take care of Retia?!" Lebe cried out. Laughing, I informed her that I myself would. I am her mother, after all. There was no reason to fear their brief absence. We weren't going to die simply because they were not here.
After they departed for one of the airfields outside of Berlin to be airlifted to England, I decided to take my daughter Retia with us to work. Although technically Bundestag members are not allowed to bring children to work, exceptions can be and are made, especially those of us who happen to have babies or toddlers, and so long as we can keep them under control, no one will cry foul. Besides, it is not as if people abuse this leniency, and when I arrived at work, several secretaries and colleagues were quite delighted to see my baby. Gernot remarked that perhaps we ought to bring Retia to work with us more often so that he could stroke his ego of being a proud father of a beautiful baby daughter some more. I told him to keep dreaming; politicians never make good parents. It is an inside joke between us, and we both laughed.
As it turned out, nothing else of significance happened today. Good news only, if you could even call it as such. Reports of local German police authorities and our special forces successfully rounding up known NDP members and associates for interrogation, but none so far have coughed up any more critical evidence. Despite this, the fact that we are shutting much of their manpower up in jail for a brief period of time means that the party - no, we have outlawed them as a political party, so organization - will be crippled if they attempt to launch more terrorist attacks with German manpower. By no means is this the end of the push to exterminate the NDP, but we are making good progress. I am rather curious to what that American team is doing right now or what they are up to, but I suppose they are working on important things. Although they certainly seem quite secretive and elusive, the results of their endeavors so far have been satisfactory and unselfish, so I suppose it will not hurt to trust them a little bit more.
Since I do not have anything else to write and I am still in the mood to write some more, I shall talk about my thoughts of Lebe. I spent some time in my earlier entries discussing Bismarck, Prinz Eugen, and U, so in order to be fair to everyone, I suppose I shall continue this trend of mine.
Her full name is Z-1 Leberecht Maass. When I first received her along with Max, I had been quite fooled - I believed them to be junge...boys, not girls. Perhaps you can imagine my great surprise when I turned to the scientists in the Wunderwaffe laboratories where Gernot and I had visited to meet them. The scientist who introduced me to them at the time, whose name was Dr. Schweitzer, immediately recognized that look of ambiguous confusion on my face and assured me that they indeed were female and not simply young boys crossdressing as girls. One of the younger scientists who overheard our conversation had been bold enough to suggest that they ought to check the girls in the name of science. Naturally, both Lebe and Max slapped him at the same time.
Besides her rather androgynous appearance, Lebe is otherwise quite your ordinary young German teenager...although, looking at the current state of German teenage youth these days, I hesitate to use the term "ordinary" to describe her in the first place. She is very feminine in her tastes and outlook, though not so to the point of annoyance. It is a pleasant feminism, more than enough to clearly establish her as a girl to those (such as myself, I admit) who may not initially think her as so at first. In fact, Lebe is the ship girl with whom I identity the most, for I once was the girl she is now when I was a junges mädchen...how many years ago was this now, thirty? She reminds me of what I may have grown up to be had I not taken a keen interest in politics and learned to put away some of the more feminine traits of mine in order to suit myself more comfortably into a career of lawmaking and statesmanship.
Lebe's main interest, surprisingly, is knitting. Lebe loves knitting. She absolutely adores it. Even more so because most of the time she has spent knitting, she usually spends it knitting something for Retia. Small scarves, mittens, sweaters, even...although they would be more useful during the winter. But I will not complain - the first few that Lebe knitted, naturally, were not very good, as she was only beginning to train herself. I did find her in our small library reading a book with Bismarck about knitting, and curious as to why she was reading such a book, I asked about. Lebe said that knitting looked like it would be a lot of fun, but she did not know very much about it, so she was trying to learn. She asked if I happened to know how to knit, which I professed I did but only to a small extent. As in, I understood the basics and could knit something simple, but due to years - decades, even - of lack of practice and a general lack of in-depth knowledge, I could not teach her anything beyond that. Lebe didn't care, and she implored me to teach her such basics. If she learned the basics, then she could then take it from there. She simply needed somewhere to get started. And so I did, for exactly three hours, and Lebe, true to her word, learned the rest by herself.
It amazes me to know that these ship girls are so incredibly sharp...perhaps several times sharper than humans like me. We always hear about stories of young prodigies or geniuses, always managing to pull off incredible feats of learning different skills. But how many of them does one meet in his or her life? Perhaps we all know that certain someone who is quite intelligent, smart, or clever. Now that I sit back and dwell on this subject, I must realize that I have been living the past few months in the company of not one, but five such geniuses. It also frightens me to know that there now exists technology to construct androids who appear and behave identically to normal humans...but whenever I look up on Lebe's face, or anyone else's face for that matter, and see her bright smile as she indulges in her enjoyment of knitting or cooking or whatever else it may be that allows her to experience joy and happiness, that fear simply...melts away. The concept of such ominous technology, called out by popular media such as movies that bemoan the advancement of controversial technology, may indeed be questionable, but perhaps if this technology is responsibly cultivated and utilized, humanity as a whole can benefit from the companionship of such girls like Lebe.
Lebe also seems especially fond of cats. Bismarck is too, but Lebe stands out because she not only holds an affinity for them but also possesses some kind of supernatural understanding with them, as though she is the Cat Whisperer. Oftentimes when I return home from work, I would find Lebe surrounded by a group of cats numbering anywhere from just one to twenty-five...even though we own no such pets. Lebe explained to me that they would always follow her home whenever she took walks to buy groceries from the local supermarket, and the cats would simply follow her home. She even recounted this one time when she had an entire conga line of cats following her down the street, drawing the curious attention of many an amused onlooker as she came home.
"I didn't ask for this power!" Lebe cried when Max asked her when the former was going to adopt a few of them for Bismarck's sake. Bismarck, incidentally, loves black cats...although they do not seem to like her back.