Saturday, February 15th, 2014.
Usual morning bullshit, but I'm getting slowly used to it. My stamina isn't. Saw in the ferrying of supplies at the Six-Pack before gettin' started on breakfast.
Because yesterday was supposed to have been a sortie day, I announced that today was going to be a sortie day instead, much to the disappointment of the ship girls who were looking forward to the weekend. I told them that making chocolates for me wasn't going to bribe me from just giving them a day off, but that wasn't enough to convince the girls. So I decided to using one of my secret weapons:
Cake.
Who can resist the cake?
After all, I'm not GlaDoS. At least it won't be a lie.
How the hell do you spell that name again?
So yeah, that instantly motivated everyone. Almost everyone. Kitakami convinced Ooi not to sortie, so there goes our torpedo cruiser power right there. Surprisingly, seeing Kitakami's and Ooi's close relationship, I expected Ooi to be more hostile towards me, but she's acting as though Kitakami and I never had a fight. In fact, she's acting way warmer towards me than before she died the first time, before her Kai upgrade. That's not how a normal teenage girl would behave, right? Something feels off - I guess I'll ask Ooi about it sometime later.
So anyways, with the pledge (not promise, I don't make promises) that I would make cakes for everyone who sortied on a Saturday, the entire fleet (except for the usuals, Kitakami, and Ooi - there were still a lot of ship girls who sortied because it was my order and that they understood that they needed to have sortied yesterday, like Kiso), set out for a recon mission around Able. According to HQ's satellite scans, Able is the north sector of the archipelago they'd found, and right now, it seems like the Abyssals are taking the loss of Able One quite seriously, as lots of Abyssal movement and activity has been spotted there. Satellite photos have even revealed that Re-Class has been patrolling those waters with a bunch of I-Class and Ha-Class destroyer escort squadrons quite regularly, which, given Re's usual extremely random patrol pattern, means that our victory at Able One was a seriously underrated victory at the time that it was fought. This means that right now's a great chance to knock out another island, but because the fleet didn't have Kitakami and Ooi, who are quite valuable to the light cruiser squadron of our fleet, I didn't want to risk sending my fleet into a full-scale assault without being at its full power, so I gave scout roles to the fleet instead. However, I issued the protocol "Capitalize": if they thought they had the chance to take one of the key enemy stations, then they were cleared to do so. Given Abyssal movement patterns and defense priorities, Able Three is the least defended, but it's located in a large bay inside of a crescent-shaped island. Getting in will be the easy part if the fleet decided to go in to take it, but if they were found and surrounded by the Abyssals, they'd have to pray to God that they weren't gonna get slaughtered on their way out.
And sure enough, they came back at around 1830 hours and reported that they successfully raided and destroyed Able Three, which turned out to be a supply station. But it's strange to hear that it's a supply station, because it's not in a strategically optimal location in the Able sector due to its positioning. Why it was a supply point beats the hell outta me, but hey, the fleet came back with another generous round of supplies they scavenged from destroying the place, so werf.
Blood for the Blood God, Supplies for the Supply God. And when I say Supply God, I mean Akagi. Kidding not kidding.
So after the fleet came back and Akagi (whom I made flagship for this run) handed me the post-action mission report, I sent the results over to HQ and headed over to the mess halls for dinner. That's when I learned about White Day. Oh God, what the fuck, Japan, are you trying to kill me? When the girls learned that I wasn't aware of White Day at all - actually, let me explain how I went about learning about White Day. Right after dinner, I got to work in the kitchens making small little cakes the size of small pies for everyone, and some of the destroyers and more gifted ship girls also helped me since it seemed fun. I think it was Atago who remarked that it was as though White Day had come instantly, and that's when I asked out loud, "What's White Day?" and everyone gave me hell for it.
Ugh...I knew there couldn't've been somethin' as good as an entire base of girls givin' me chocolates for no reason. The world sure is a cruel place, Dad. This is the one thing you and Mom didn't teach me when raising me.
The real MVP for today, though, has gotta be Hatsuharu. My God, that girl learns fast. Whenever I finished one part of the cake making process, I'd turn around and bam, there's Hatsuharu with the same exact batch. Hatsuharu alone doubled our efficiency, and with everyone else who helped out, I managed to crank out enough cakes to give everyone at base a pair of small cakes.
The more...tsundere girls at first didn't want the cakes. Murakumo and Akebono especially, Akebono obviously more violently so. But as everyone started saying how good the cakes were, Murakumo buckled pretty damn quick to her temptations and demanded that I give her some. So I did and got the pleasure of watching her head arrays go red and bow as she "tactically retreated" to her dorm. Akebono behaved much in the same way, but Sazanami kept annoying her about them, so eventually Akebono, too, got some from me. She told me not to get any wrong ideas, so I said that this would be the first and only time I would ever make cakes for her.
Let's see how long Akebono lasts. I did say that my cakes weren't anything to write home about, but if Akebono's got a sweet tooth...
Akagi and Yamato, naturally, got four. At first, some of the destroyers complained about this, saying that it was unfair, but I told them to eat the cakes and see if they wanted to ask me for more. They didn't.
After everyone enjoyed their cakes, Houshou invited everyone to head over to Shinsengumi for Happy Hour, or basically what Americans would call Happy Hour whenever they're at a bar or something. With today's supplies, Houshou had placed an order for several dozen bottles of Shigemasu sake. I stayed behind to clean up the kitchen and told everyone to go enjoy themselves for a successful sortie, but after everyone left, Inazuma still stayed behind. She asked if she could help, and I accepted her offer.
As we were cleaning, she asked me if her chocolates that she gave me yesterday were any good. I told her that those were the best chocolates I'd gotten in my life, though I did mention that my rating of it wasn't very accurate since I've never received Valentine's Day chocolates before in my life either. I said that the effort that she put into her chocolates really showed, and that I appreciated it, though I'm still at a loss for how I'm supposed to exactly go about giving almost all the girls at base candy for White Day next month. (Come to think of it, White Day's basically the unofficial mathematics holiday of Pi Day. Maybe I could just make pies for everyone.)
Inazuma didn't even try to hide her deep satisfaction with my words of praise. She looked just like a nice little kid, smiling like that. Put her anywhere outside of this base and you'd never think that she was a ship girl capable of terrific destruction.
She asked me why I'd never gotten any Valentine's Day gifts or chocos before. She told me that I seemed like the type of guy to get a lot of those things - after all, Valentine's Day was celebrated over in America, right? I told her with a bit of a laugh that Valentine's Day is nowhere near as romantic or widely practiced in America as it is in Japan - at least, not from what I could tell. Perhaps it's just my own life circumstances, but even omitting the military parts of my life, no one really took Valentine's Day seriously in middle school or even high school. Only those who were dating, especially those people who everyone knew were probably gonna go all the way, really gave each other candy and chocolates on Valentine's. We had those Valentine's Day grams, but people used them as jokes more than an actual demonstration of gratitude or anything deeper in meaning. All on top of the fact that I never really considered myself to have a whole lot of friends; I knew lots of people, and lots of people knew me, but I was mostly just a name that crept up every once in a while, and I preferred it to stay that way.
Inazuma lamented that such a wonderful day as Valentine's was so ignored in America - after all, wasn't Valentine's a Western custom that spread to Japan? I had to clarify that while I didn't know the exact details myself, I wasn't trying to speak for all of America - I'm sure there are lots of people and places where Valentine's is taken quite seriously and it's a happy occasion for all involved. It's just that personally, it's never had an impact on my life, so that's why I didn't really expect the flood of chocolates I got yesterday, and much less the reciprocal day of White Day.
Inazuma said that I didn't have to get her anything for White Day. She said this real low and quiet, as though she's trying to subtly ask for something else other than chocolate.
Put two and two together, and the answer is obvious, even for a dense, stupid American like me. But I pretended that I didn't know, since I want this to be a surprise. If I can pull this one off, I'm sure this'd be the best White Day present she'll get. I just acted as though I was super grateful that I had one less girl to worry about to get chocolates for.
After finishing cleaning, I saw Inazuma off to Shinsengumi, saying that I would catch up with them later, and made a detour for my office. Booted up my laptop to access my email, and I saw an email sitting in my inbox this late at night, and the email address is blank. Whoa, I wonder who that's from...
But first, I looked up who Inazuma's ship sisters were on the complete ship girl roster, and I sent an email to HQ specifically requesting that the Fubuki Type III destroyers Akatsuki, Hibiki, and Ikazuchi be deployed to Okinawa from the mainland on March 14 of next month. If this wasn't possible, then I told HQ that I would be willing to pay any price that didn't involve having to return any of my presently deployed ship girls. I told them that I needed to make this happen on this exact day, and that I was willing to use my authority as an American commander of the Moebius Four Armament Pact to make it happen on my own volition.
After that, I joined the fleet at Shinsengumi as they were partying hard with bottles of Shigemasu sake. Takao had already downed an entire bottle, and Akagi and Souryuu were competing to see who could drink more and hold their liquor. Yamato, surprisingly, wasn't drinking. She said that she wanted to stay sober to help everyone go back to their dorms and help Houshou clean up the place after they were gone. Yahagi, too, for this reason, wasn't partaking in the drinking, so I sat down with Yamato and Yahagi and ordered some Ramune for the three of us to enjoy.
Knowing the history of Operation Ten-Go, Yahagi was part of Yamato's task force and sole light cruiser escort, and she had fallen basically within plain sight of Yamato in front of her, and the two of the sank more or less together, minutes apart.
Let me just go off on a side tangent here. I don't know if I already mentioned this, but I'm a pretty big history buff. While most normal people find history to be incredibly boring and useless, I find it fascinating and interesting in a way that would scare most normal people. And call me morbid, but I really like reading about the tragic stories that history's got to offer. Who needs television dramas and modern-day bullshit like that when all you need to do is open up a good history book or dig through some historical archives to find genuine drama like this.
That being said, the history of the Imperial Japanese Navy is straight fucking depressing. At least, starting with Midway, since...that's where the IJN goes to shit after that.
So I decided to take a chance. I asked Yamato and Yahagi if they were happy at all that they got to see each other again. Yamato said that she'd never expected to have the chance to be able to see Yahagi again. She remembers being able to see Yahagi get sunk right behind her, when she herself was just about to get ripped to pieces. She mentioned how before Op Ten-Go, they'd never really met before. Yahagi had only heard of Yamato by name but never saw her physically until that mission, yet that didn't stop her from defending Yamato until they all got wrecked, which was ultimately the point of that op. Yamato said that she was too grateful to put in words for the support that she'd received from her task force, even though they knew they were all gonna die, more or less, because even despite that, everyone (well, almost everyone) fell fighting.
Not a step backwards.
Yamato also said that she felt a special gratefulness towards Yahagi, and Yahagi reciprocated the same feeling as well. They never really knew each other before the op, so they had no reason to really become this good of friends, but I guess if you realize that someone has your back when you're in a hole full of shit, that changes your opinion of that person for good.
I told them that I would do whatever I could to prevent a repeat of that op. They've been given a chance to relive their lives again in a different form; it would be a plain cruelty to have them go through another rendition of that.
Which makes me remember that last line I wrote in the comprehensive report for Moebius Four. I'm gonna kill whoever suggested that. These girls are no longer just dispensable warships made of scrap metal. I know it's hard to believe for some people involved in this program, and I know this might sound so fucking painfully obvious, but these girls are human beings.
Anyone who disagrees can go peel their own fingernails off.