Sunday, February 16th, 2014.

As expected, everyone who drank yesterday at Shinsengumi had hangovers the next day. And Takao wonders why she's not getting the secretary ship position back.

Because of this, it was just me, Mamiya, Irako, and Houshou working in the kitchens today. Usually we'd have a few destroyers or ship girls who wake up early and hang around near the mess hall for breakfast before heading off for morning practice and training, but not so today. I mean, today's Sunday, after all, no one does shit on Sunday. I didn't know that the mess hall could get so quiet.

So two interesting things today in my email: the first one's an urgent email from HQ with more satellite photos attached. This time, they're showing that the Abyssals have pulled their forces in the Able sector all around Able Four, the central, most geographically protected island of the archipelago. They've completely abandoned Able Two, and it looks like they've stopped whatever they were doing at Able One.

This is extremely eerie. By doing this, they can't defend Able One, Able Two, or Able Three at all, which can only mean that obviously, there's something that Able Four contains that we don't know about.

One of the satellite photos indicates that HQ was thinking the same thing: it's zoomed in as much as the satellite can allow, and while it's a bit blurry, the photo focuses on a weird whirlpool that's sitting in front of what looks to be the main dockyards of Able Four. But the strange thing is, that whirlpool isn't visible from any of the other photos. And it's clear that there're people heading into the whirlpool. What the fuck is even going on.

Clearly, they're hiding something. But is better to attack to find out what's going on down there? For all we know, it might just be a trap. It might not turn out to be anything significant. But I have a feeling that if we just let this go unhindered, it'll come back to bite us in the ass. They're preparing something, but we don't know what. On top of which, if I decided to send the fleet down there, it's gonna be a fucking bloodbath. There's no light way to put it. There will be casualties, and even some more fatalties if two fleets this large clash. I'm not sure if I'm willing to commit to that - the stakes just aren't high enough yet, because we need more intel.

For now, I think the best course of action is to attack everywhere else. Because the Abyssals have pulled almost all their forces to Able Four, that means that if I send in the fleet to attack, they can attack Able One, Able Two, and Able Three and level those places to the ground so that that the Abyssals can't ever use them again, or they'll be spending a lot of time trying to rebuild them, time that we can use to attack the other sectors. We'll take whatever resources that those bases yield and back off and wait to see what the Abyssals' reactions are. If they insist on defending Able Four with their lives, we'll just poke another sector, like Baker.

Now, moving onto the second piece of interesting intel:

"Good work on securing those Abyssal specimens. We've got two of our squad, Lauren and Losira, continuing the research on the specimens right now, but so far we've managed to compile an early assessment report that I think you'll want to have a look at. We'll just leave the most important bits here.

The Abyssal destroyers you've recovered have surprisingly extremely similar DNA signatures to those owned by prehistoric reptiles and amphibians. In other words, in case science isn't your thing, the destroyers are basically animals that can go on both land and water, but water's more their thing, since they don't seem to be able to attack on land - in fact, as you've probably already noticed, they're a bit...how should I say...derpy.

But here's where it gets disturbing: their DNA is completely manufactured - it's not natural. It was obvious when we printed out the DNA result maps for the Abyssal destroyers that there was a whole lot of DNA splicing, reconfiguration, and all sorts of genetic manipulation going on. This means that most likely, these Abyssal vessels didn't just come out of nowhere for no reason - there's someone, or something, inside Sector B intentionally creating these things and fielding them. This may or may not apply to all the other ship types of the Abyssals, but the destroyers are most likely being manufactured. Able One, which we heard your fleet destroyed the other day, may have been one of those manufacturing plants creating these destroyers, among other things that they might be cooking up.

That's not to say that these Abyssal destroyers' DNA wasn't well done - in fact, it's really well manipulated, considering how much their DNA's been tampered with. It optimizes their physical capabilities and draws upon some of the natural properties that reptiles and water-borne animals might have in order to make them stronger and more versatile. For example, you know how a lizard grows another tail if you chop it off? We found that these destroyers will automatically grow back any limb that they've been missing. In fact, if they're not outright killed, they'll grow back basically anything - even parts of their own brains if they're lucky enough to survive.

I should also mention that the Abyssal destroyers understand human language. They don't have the brain capacity to really understand language at all, but because of the way they've been coded on a genetic level, they actually can learn human languages pretty damn quick. They just can't talk back. They've been following Lauren around the base whenever she calls them in for food. And it seems like they'll eat just about anything. Weird.

Well, while I say they can't talk, they sort of can...they just go around squeaking 'kyuu' or something. We don't really know what they're trying to say, or if they're really saying anything useful in the first place.

The last interesting bit that we've got is that the Abyssal destroyers have what we've come to call 'augmentations'. If you found the eye colors of the destroyers to be a bit weird, we thought so too. So we decided to look into it - literally, too - and eventually we studied their DNA enough to find that they've been coded to possess up to three special slots of...something, like abilities, I guess, for lack of a better term. Like I said, we've decided to call them augmentations for now. The Ha-Class and the Ro-Class destroyers you captured both have an augmentation that's apparently called 'mkii_elite', which, judging by the nomenclature, might mean that the Ha-Class and the Ro-Class are elite variants of the normal Ha-Class and Ro-Class. This probably means that you can tell the rank and relative strength of the Abyssal vessels straight away by eye color. Inform your fleet of this and instruct them to be on the lookout for those with different eye colors - there's probably more than just green and red we're dealing with here.

Again, thanks for getting these specimens for us. Looks like our little gamble to intervene's beginning to pay off. We're going to extract as much info from the specimens as we can - we already have a few ideas of what to do with it.

Additionally, keep your fleet on the lookout for more specimens. Now that we've gotten some destroyer samples, it'll be great if we got some specimens of other ship types. But again, don't make it a priority objective. We can wait."

So now, the situation's finally beginning to take shape.

Firstly, we know that the Abyssal fleet is much more sophisticated than I think anyone expected them to be. Even the destroyers, who just look like xenomorphic aliens straight out of Alien Vs. Predator, clearly have elements of human intelligence, seeing that they can understand human language, and not necessarily on the same level that household pets do. So does this mean that the more humanoid looking Abyssals are capable of communicating? If so, there might be a chance that we can actually just straight up go talk to them and see what the hell's going on.

Secondly, we now know that there's someone, something, or some group behind this whole Abyssal outbreak. A terrorist group? But all the most well-known international terrorist organizations have declined involvement in this, saying that they have no hand in this. Of course, they could be lying, but it doesn't make sense for them to be involved anyway. If Seal Team 6's data analysis is to be taken as true, then clearly, the obvious answer is that there's someone actually going around manufacturing Abyssal vessels. But who? No one comes to mind. Maybe Seal Team 6 knows, but if they do know, then chances are they're the only ones who know for a good reason. After all, they are the most highly classified special ops team in America.

But still, that leaves the crucial questions yet unanswered and opening up even more questions than are answered: who's making them? Who's commanding them? Are the people who make them and the people who command them the same people or person, or are they different? What're they fighting for? Why are they fighting? For all we know, they could've just been the result of a freak evolution process that just spontaneously occurred, and simply by trying to defend themselves so that they can survive, they started attacking international shipping routes because they didn't know any better. Still too many questions unanswered.

Hey, at least back in the second World War, everyone knew why everyone else was fighting. At least we knew the Nazis were fighting to take over Europe, and we knew we had to stop them. At least we knew that the Japanese were trying to expand their empire, and when we came in to avenge Pearl Harbor, they were fighting to defend their home country as we bombed it all over.

At least we knew.

We don't know anything this time around.

I called in several of the ship girls into my office to share this intel with them before dinnertime: Yamato, Ooyodo, Akashi, Takao (she'd recovered somewhat from her hangover, though I could still smell the sake on her), Atago, Akagi, and Souryuu. I told them what I thought of the situation (those two points I wrote above) and asked them of their own opinions about the matter.

Yamato felt that if such were the case, there may be an alternative to openly armed conflict. If even the Abyssal destroyers were capable of learning and understanding language, perhaps there could be a reconciliation of differences and hostilities without the use of war and the shedding of blood and metal. She wasn't very sure about who was behind the Abyssal threat, however.

Ooyodo, true to her nature, stated that we needed more information still, because while what we have now was an important step to understanding the enemy, it still wasn't enough to make any concrete decisions about them just yet. She did agree with Yamato, though, that attempting to open communications with them probably wouldn't be a bad idea to try to shorten the length of this conflict.

Akashi, again true to her nature, was more interested in the technological aspects of the Abyssals. She expressed a keen interest in the fact that Abyssal vessels had regenerative properties and the fact that they were able to carry augmentations, and she wondered if such augmentation technology could be applied to the ship girls themselves as upgrades, like Ooi's and Imuya's Kai upgrades.

Takao was much more staunch on a firm opposition against the Abyssals. She said that the Abyssals have already demonstrated their ability to slaughter them without remorse. In fact, wasn't that what the initial deaths of Ooi and Imuya supposed to have highlighted the most? With that in mind, reconciliation would be a nearly futile effort. There was little chance we could open diplomatic negotiations with such a warlike species as the Abyssals when they were more prone to shoot on sight than to agree to any terms. Takao concluded that we mustn't take a chance with the Abyssals and put our foot down on them for good before any more ship girls at base go down like Ooi and Imuya did. Basically, she said, it's either us or them, and she didn't want the dead ones to be us.

Atago, as expected, was on the exact opposite side of the spectrum from Takao. Her opinion was basically Yamato's on crack: she even suggested that Abyssals had the capability to co-exist within normal human society, much like the ship girls themselves can. It's seriously hard to believe that Takao and Atago are sisters in any sense, but...I guess they are.

Akagi didn't have an opinion, surprisingly enough. I guess she was more focused on what's for dinner. But she did say that if the Abyssals could become friends, it would certainly be better for everyone.

Souryuu joined Takao's side, but she was much more moderate. She expressed concern about the whole idea of Abyssals becoming friendly, doubting that the Abyssals would ever show any sign of surrendering willingly, but she was open to the prospect of co-existence. The only hard part, she said, was convincing the Abyssals that they didn't need to fight, and that, she said, was the one part that made her skeptical in a worried way.

My brain's automatically trying to come up with explanations to the questions we have on our hands, but it'll do me no good to write them down, since they're all just a bunch of ramblings. We have to progress further to see what's really going on. And to do that, it means we need to keep fighting.