Monday, February 3rd, 2014.
There's honestly not much to write today, so I'm just gonna keep this nice 'n short.
Our heavily damaged girls, more or less, got discharged today from the medbay. Akashi's been healing slower than the others, but that's 'cause she's been working on building extra limbs and body parts for our critically damaged girls, so that's understandable.
Personally, today's just another normal day. Minus the sortieing. Paperwork, reports, government crap...whatever, they're just run of the mill by now. And with no sorties for the next two weeks or something, I'm in no rush to develop mission objectives for any future missions.
The good thing about this is that now that all our ship girls are basically more or less recovered from their wounds, except obviously for our critically damaged girls (Souryuu is the sole exception here since she didn't suffer as horrible of wounds as my starter destroyers), they were able to pitch in their help in putting the last touches on the dockyards, or the bathhouses, and with their help, we finished them much faster than initially anticipated, and we opened them on Monday night at around 2130 hours, just after dinnertime. We ate dinner while waiting for the bathhouses to get the water circulation system initialized and working, and by the time we were finished eating, the dockyards were ready to be used, so the girls went for a dip, and whatever wounds that still needed a bit more healing got instantly patched up by the healing nano-bots in the bathwater.
Hurray for modern technology.
Now that the dockyards were up and running, I ordered the critically injured ship girls to be moved to the medbay section of the docks, or the "medbay docks", as Kiyoshimo instantly dubbed them. That wasn't really the name I was looking for, but since the other girls started calling them the "medbay docks" after Kiyoshimo, it's too late to give them a proper name now. The medbay docks weren't originally part of the blueprint for the dockyards, but ever since I was informed about our capture mission that went oh-so-smoothly, I decided to add them in just in case. Boy am I glad I did.
Basically, the medbay docks are like the infirmary or the medbay where Akashi works, where there's two rows of individual small tubs in the floor that get circulated with nano-bot bathwater, but I've regulated the water there to contain a denser concentration of repair nano-bots, so not only will that particular bathwater heal injured ship girls faster (at least theoretically), but the water itself also looks slightly greener due to the denser concentration of nano-bots in the water.
In case you're wondering how this nano-bot stuff works, since I don't think I've explained it yet (if I have, either I don't remember or I didn't give too much detail into it), basically the water is the same as any normal bathwater you'd find in a normal bathhouse, but obviously here they contain special nano-bot particles. Technically speaking, they're not really robots or even nano-bots, but instead they're tiny particle-sized pieces of Smartsteel, the same classified material that the ship girls are constructed with, that travel well with water and are pre-programmed to seek out injured places on a ship girl's body when they soak in the water and repair any damage they find. They'll basically heal any degree of wound, so again, theoretically speaking, if we can get a ship girl here into the medbay docks before she dies, she'll live. I guess we'll have the chance to test that out for real later on down the road if we get another capture mission or something like that, I suppose. The water gets circulated out constantly in them medbay docks (it's a bit different for the normal baths) so that fresh nano-bot water can be supplied to any injured ship girl occupying the medbay docks, and the used water gets filtered out to a recycling generator we have installed towards the back of the dockyards, where the water gets cleaned of external particles like blood, dirt, oil, grime, or anything else a ship girl might have on her after a battle. Once cleaned, the water pumps into a smaller generator, where the nano-bots are fed into the water and pumped back into the dockyards.
TL;DR, no ship girl, not even the carriers, should take more than half a day sitting in the docks for any amount of repairs.
Hey, so like, if only we had this just a little bit earlier...
Well, no point fussing over it now. At least my critically injured destroyers can use the new medbay dockyards for what they're worth. Akashi took a dip in a medbay dock herself, and her wounds patched up in a matter of less than two hours, and she went straight back to her workshop to finish building whatever body parts the destroyers lost in the battle.
The only problem is that I'm not exactly sure if I'm even allowed to use the docks myself. Humans like me can go in, because it's not like a normal human body's going to be affected by the nano-bots in the water, but we didn't make any distinction between the men's bath and the women's bath.
Well, then again, there's no point in doing that, because I'm the only guy in the base. So go figure. I'll just be happy with my own little bathroom and shower in my room.
After making sure that the critically injured destroyers got relocated to the medbay docks, I headed over to the light cruiser dorms and knocked on Kitakami's door. Kitakami has yet to show her face outside her dorm ever since the other day when they took Ooi's body away from her. She's been eating when Mamiya or Irako puts food in front of her door, so it's not like she's completely suicidal, but she's definitely depressed, and I'm in no mood to try and help her. I asked her if she wanted to go take a dip in the docks that we finished tonight, that it might make her feel at least a bit better. She didn't answer me, so I didn't bother sticking around for too long. If she wants to keep sulking in there, that's fine. I know what she feels and is going through - but it's still hard for me to empathize for her. Her words from the other day still dance on my mind like tapdancers, and it fucking irritates me still thinking about it.
I headed over to Shinsengumi for some ramen and ginger ale, since I heard that Houshou had gone back to working her little izakaya now that she's fully healed from taking a bath in the docks. Sure enough, she was there, and there was only one other person there with me, and that was Souryuu. Her arm was fully healed, but she still had fresh bandages over her left shoulder and her right eye. When I walked in, I found Houshou and Souryuu sitting side by side at the front counter, and Souryuu had her head on Houshou's left shoulder, but as soon as she realized that I had walked in, Souryuu nearly fell out of her seat in surprise.
Houshou explained to me, much to Souryuu's chagrin, that she had been spending some "quality time" with Souryuu, now that they had a chance to finally take an evening and spend some time alone together. When I asked Houshou why, she explained that the carriers generally looked up to Houshou as a sort of mother figure, Houshou historically being not only Japan's but also the world's first purpose-built and designed aircraft carrier. You could say that Houshou "gave birth" to the rest of Japan's World War II-era carriers because Japan had learned much of their carrier-building expertise and carrier combat procedure and potential from Houshou, hence the "motherly figure" get-up for Houshou.
I mean, if you put it that way, with historical evidence to back it up, I don't think there's anything embarrassing or wrong with showing Houshou affection. If you want to treat someone as your mother and that someone reciprocates it in kind, then what's so wrong about that? Houshou always had that motherly, mature older-woman kind of vibe and atmosphere anyway, so it fits right in.
As Houshou prepared my ramen and I waited while sipping on some ginger ale, Souryuu apologized to me for the failure of the mission. She said that she had neglected to launch recon planes when first entering Sector B waters, thinking that no single Abyssal squadron would be crazy enough to engage the fleet due to its sheer size, but had she had done so, she most definitely would have realized that they were being tracked and could have instructed the fleet to pull back to gain a better position on the Abyssals. That being said, she also said that there was only so much she and Shouhou and Houshou, being our only carriers in the fleet, could do. Souryuu alone could provide more than double the air power that Houshou and Shouhou combined could provide, and while the light carriers' contributions were invaluable, Souryuu said that the battle could have turned out much differently had we had more standard carriers. She urged me to press HQ to send more carriers to Okinawa, saying that she alone could not carry the fleet on her back and simply air-superiority their way to victory.
I told Souryuu that HQ was in no terms to send more reinforcements. From their perspective, they barely sent reinforcements not even last week, so we couldn't expect any more for at least another month or two - realistically speaking, probably not until another three months, to be perfectly honest. I told Souryuu that I did what I could to find out the unreasonable logic behind the capture mission, to persuade the Ministry of Defense and the Bureau of Counter-Terrorism to send more ship girls, but they had amounted to nothing, and that we were stuck with what we had.
Houshou brought me my ramen, and I ate in silence. Now that I was here, interrupting Houshou's and Souryuu's little private bubble that they had going on before I had come in, Houshou and Souryuu too, were silent. Basically, I wanted to eat and leave quickly so that I wouldn't intrude on them any longer. It's the feeling that you get when you're alone with a few other people, and it's obvious that you're not part of the atmosphere.
Once I finished, I thanked Houshou for the meal and told Souryuu before I left that she was lucky to have someone she could look up to and call "Mother" if she wanted to, and that if she truly felt that she had a mother, it would be best if she made it clear before it was too late. I told Souryuu that I didn't want to end up with another Kitakami on my hands, and I left.
Didn't I say this was gonna be a short entry? Goddamn it.
I went out to the pier again before going to bed - it's becoming a habit. Whether it's good or bad, I can't tell. It's not that I'm doing it out of sentimentality or to be a romanticist. It just helps me calm down, staring out into the dark abyss of the black night sea.
They say that humans fear the unknown because they don't know what will happen or what the future will hold. I guess I'm one of those few outliers who're the exact opposite...