Monday, February 24th, 2014.
Just as planned, Kitakami got helied in at 1000 hours, almost down to the exact second. But Kitakami wasn't the only thing Seal Team Six sent over.
After she arrived, Kitakami reported to me in my office (we walked to my office from the Six Pack, more like) and showed me three small PDA-looking devices that she'd been given by the members of Seal Team Six. These PDA's don't have a name quite yet, but for now, they're known as "external augmentations", and these three that she gave me were the first usable copies that Seal Team Six have produced using the intel they've extracted from the Abyssal destroyer specimens they've been working with.
Basically this is how they work: I assign three of the ship girls besides Kitakami to equip them, since obviously one girl can equip one PDA. It's pointless for one girl to equip two of these external augmentations for now, since the augmentations aren't yet designed to work in conjunction with one another if equipped to the same ship girl. The augmentations wrap around the girls' arms, just below their wrists; it doesn't matter which arm since the augmentation tablets themselves are ambidextrous - and bam, just like that, they're equipped. According to Kitakami, these augmentations automatically scan for special frequencies that the ship girls emit passively because of their Smartsteel constructs, and once they detect the strongest signals in relation to proximity (basically a fancy way of saying that they'll scan for the nearest ship girl once turned on), the augmentations'll request permission to synchronize with the ship girl's systems. Once synchronized, the augmentations will grant the ship girls equipping them a special ability. Picture it as an external hard drive being hooked up to a computer, because that's exactly how these augmentations work.
It really does sound like some sort of video game now. But if video games are good at one thing, they're really good at providing great ideas for practical use.
The three augmentations that were sent via Kitakami are all actually capable of producing different abilities.
One's called the Waterfall Shield, another one's called the Automated Reloader, and the last one's called the Mjölnir Cell Reinforcement.
Some of these sound familiar...
Upon turning on the tablets and checking their descriptions for myself, I know what each augmentation does.
The Waterfall Shield is an active augmentation, meaning that it needs to be physically activated, but the activation itself is simple, since whoever equips this only needs to tap the touch screen of the PDA at the confirmation screen, which'll be up during battle anyway. They'll just need the reaction to pop it. Anyways, once activated, it'll create a personal shield vortex around the user that'll deflect incoming bullets and cannon rounds that don't exceed 41cm, so only the biggest of cannon rounds can penetrate the shield. But it's not like a solid wall that you'd think of when you hear the word "shield": instead, the vortex causes the explosives inside any incoming shell to detonate as soon as it enters the vortex field and reverses the energy released from the forced explosion away from the user, rendering the user invulnerable. For bullets, however, it more or less acts like a wall by calculating the angle at which the bullets are entering the field and compressing air to knock the bullet away with a margin of 1% error (as in, there's a maximum of 1% difference in response times between the initial entrance of the bullet into vortex territory and when the vortex field reacts to the entrance of the bullet, and this's mainly due to different calibers of bullets). Curiously, because of the way the vortex interacts with the air that it encompasses, the vortex turns the air blue, and when it's first activated, it shimmers down from top to bottom just like a waterfall, so hence its name.
The Automated Reloader is a passive augmentation, and this one's much simpler to explain. All it does it rework the user's reloading sequence so that the coding that manages the manual reloading of the user's weapons is optimized by 10%, meaning that all weapons that the user's equipped with fires 10% faster and turns angles to acquire targets 10% faster. While 10% might not sound like much, you have to understand that the heavy ship girls, such as the heavy cruisers and battleships, wield guns that take a long time to reload after each shot. For example, Kirishima's 35.6cm cannons take thirty seconds to reload in between shots, but with the Automated Reloader augmentation, reload time is cut down to 27 seconds. This makes Kirishima's volleys much more dangerous because this'll make her primary weapons, the 35.6cm cannons, much easier to coordinate fleet volleys with the other ship girls. For example, the light cruisers' 14cm naval guns take about thirteen seconds to reload, so the light cruisers can get one volley off to cover Kirishima as she reloads, and she can use her 35.6cm volley as a devastating follow-up shot to the light cruisers' second volley. A simple augmentation, but the implications are tremendous. The only bad thing about it's that as you might figure out, its effectiveness's utilized the best when used by battleships or heavy cruisers, and carriers can't equip this at all, since they don't shoot any machine-based weaponry, only planes.
The Mjölnir Cell Reinforcement is another passive augmentation, and it's pretty straightforward like the Automated Reloader. It strengthens the user's cells by causing them to grow extra layers of cell membranes for protection, and while for a normal human being's body this won't really do much, the ship girls' Smartsteel construction exponentially benefits from having extra layers of membranes protecting its cells, which means that the user essentially receives a health buff, if I may dare to use video game terms. Specifically, the user can take an additional 25% amount of incoming damage, but what that actually means still isn't clear. Does it mean the user can tank that much more damage until they're critically injured, or does this mean that they can tank that much more damage until they're dead? And what if they get hit in the eye, or what if a limb gets cut off? What happens then? That's the only problem I see with this augmentation. As cool and great as it sounds, it's too ambiguous. Simply being told that the user can take "25% more damage" doesn't mean anything to me. After all, real life isn't the same as a video game.
By the way, before I forget, Kitakami had her own augmentation installed not as a PDA, but as an internal file of code that Seal Team Six had her brain download. The particular augmentation that she received is so powerful that it can't actually operate as an external PDA effectively enough. Her internal augmentation's called the Weapon Pre-Igniter. Normally, when the ship girls acquire enemy targets, they need to calculate all the weapons ballistics info that goes into the process of actually locking onto their intended targets, and this process usually takes just as much time as it takes their weapons to load the first round. The Weapon Pre-Igniter augmentation not only instantly primes all the user's weapon systems, but in order to acquire a target, the user only needs to look at something and confirm it as a target. And now that Kitakami's come with the exact same loadout as Ooi, since they're both in Kai form, the opening strike potential of the fleet is literally off the charts. I can sit here all day and think of all the possibilities that the fleet has in terms of offensive tactics simply because Kitakami has such a powerful augmentation.
So now that I've spent a good twenty minutes writing this and sounding like a complete nerd, let's move on. After morning training and lunch, I gathered the fleet out in the docks. I explained the use of the augmentations to the fleet, and I chose Murakumo to equip the Waterfall Shield, Kirishima the Automated Reloader, and Akagi the Mjölnir Cell Reinforcement. (I had to debate with myself for nearly fifteen minutes whether I wanted Yamato to have the Mjölnir Cell Reinforcement over Akagi, but then I remembered the repair times for the two if they get damaged. Plus, more objectively speaking, Akagi is crucial to the fleet as one of our two standard carriers. Losing one carrier is much more devastating than losing one battleship, though losing neither is always preferable.) We made sure that the augmentations were working properly, and I gave them their orders.
According to HQ's satellite photos for today, there were lots of Abyssal fleet movement commuting between Able and Baker Districts - specifically, from Baker One to Able Four. Maybe they're relocating the floating platforms that're incubating the Floating Fortresses so that the fleet doesn't come along and destroy the rest of them on their second pass, but this basically stretches out the Abyssal lines and defense. Therefore, the fleet's objective is to disrupt transportation lines going between Able Four and Baker One and destroy as many of the floating platforms being relocated as possible.
Because of their new augmentations, I assigned specific roles to the girls who have them, since I knew they'd be up to the task. Murakumo is to be the leader of the vanguard ship girls. She's to pop her Waterfall Shield and rush in, purposely draw fire, and tank incoming shots until the Waterfall Shield starts to give out, since it doesn't last forever, and its duration shortens every time it deflects a hit. I made Kirishima the flagship for this mission, since her increased potential firepower allows her to assume a forward position in the fleet, further up than where the other battleships normally would be, thus allowing her to assess the front-line situation a lot more effectively. Akagi can just continue doing her thing, but because of her new augmentation, I told her that she could have more freedom to do as she saw fit, since she could take one or two big hits and still be fine.
I asked all three of them to leave performance reports in my office after they got back from the mission so that I could send back feedback to Seal Team Six to fix any glitches or discomforts or disadvantages with the augmentations, and I deployed the fleet.
After deployment, I changed out to civvie clothes and told Mamiya and Irako where I was going, asking them to look after the base. On my way out, though, I ran into Error, who asked me where I was going. I told her that I was going outside to the nearby town to get some cake ingredients for the cake I'm making for Inazuma's launch day and to win that big Thor teddy bear that Samidare and Sazanami tried to get from the arcade there. I asked her if she wanted to join me, and she nodded. So I headed over to the town, walking with a girl who's nearly half a foot shorter than me and had a cat sitting on her hat. I felt a bit awkward as we walked into town, to be honest.
After getting the ingredients, we headed to the arcade that Samidare and Sazanami were talking about. The arcade machine that had the teddy bear, unfortunately, had an out-of-order sign on it, so I was like, urgh, goddamn it. But after walking around, to my surprise, there was a little shooting gallery towards the side of the arcade, and one of the prizes was the exact same big teddy. So I asked the guy working the little shooting gallery if I could try to win the teddy, so he gave me a toy rifle, and all I had to do was shoot twenty targets in ten seconds.
Later on, Error told me that the normal requirement to win the teddy was to shoot only ten targets in fifteen seconds.
With my training in marksmanship, twenty targets at only a three meter range in ten seconds is easy, even while wounded, so I did this easily, and I could tell the guy gave the teddy to me with reluctance. As if to save face, he asked me in broken English,
"As expected of, uh, foreigner! Um...where you from, mister?"
I spoke back to him in perfect but Americanized Japanese that I was visiting from America, and he replied in Japanese:
"Ah, of course! No wonder you did this so well, all the Americans own guns over there, don't they? This was just natural for you!"
Well...
I asked Error to hold the big teddy for me for a second. I asked the guy why he thought that, and where he'd heard that from.
"Well, it's - everyone knows that, right? Every single American owns a gun. Who doesn't know that? How else can America's military influence around the world be so invasive? I mean, Okinawa here was just given back to us recently. How else could they have kept this island for so long? America's the one who took all our guns away since the war and only recently gave them back, right? Didn't you know?"
I told him that being a resident from America, I could assure him that all Americans in fact did not own guns. Only a small percentage of Americans keep household firearms for various reasons, not just because they were gun nuts.
"No way! What about you? Do you have a gun back at home?"
So it was at that point when I took off my coat and pulled off my shirt right in front of him. At first, he was super confused, like, dude, what the fuck are you doing stripping right in front of me. But as soon as he saw my bandages and the three small dots of red poking slightly through, since the bandages are about a day old by now, he shut right up.
I asked him if it made any sense for someone like me, who got shot three times just the past week by Japanese people who wanted me to get the fuck out of Japan, to possess a gun. I asked him politely to please refrain from making stereotypical remarks towards my country and towards any other country. As I threw my clothes back on and began to leave, I remarked out loud, just for the sake of spite, that I had visited Japan in vain, because everything that I'd thought about the nation and its people being polite and really nice and welcoming was sadly mistaken.
As we exited the arcade, I heard the same guy yell after me,
"Well, then, maybe you should stay out of my country! You've been here for long enough, haven't you?!"
Maybe I should take Murakumo's advice and start conceal-carrying from now on.
On our walk back to base, Error tried to cheer me up, telling me that not all Japanese people were like that. We were in Okinawa - the local Okinawans generally aren't too warm towards Americans, after all, and for good reason. I told Error that while I understood the extenuating circumstances surrounding the situation, I was still really, really bitter at the fact that people like him and the guys who tried to kill me last week can still be such fucking shitty people. And while I understood that one Japanese guy's behavior can't be accounted for the behavior of all Japanese people, let's face it: it's really, really hard to not to think that way and feel resentful. But I told Error not to worry about it. I'll forget about it with due time...
I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening preparing Inazuma's cake. I decided to go with the good ol' lemon drizzle cake, but since the normal recipe only makes enough for ten slices, I basically made a triple-stacker lemon drizzle cake and glazed it all over, so it has the sweetness of lemons and glazed doughnuts combined together for a sweetness overload. It sounds weird, I know, but tasting it, Mamiya, Error, Irako, and Houshou all thought the cake was great. So I made two more exactly like it in case the girls ask for the more tomorrow, and we stashed them away inside the ovens just before the fleet returned at 1924 hours.
This time around, lots of the girls came back with moderate damage. It seemed like in today's sortie, the girls either got away unscathed or suffered moderate damage, nothing in between and nothing worse. Well, it could've been much worse.
Murakumo, Kirishima, and Akagi left their feedback reports on their augmentations on my desk, along with Kirishima's post-action mission report, but I'll read them tomorrow in the morning since I'm pretty beat from everything that happened today. Though, it really seems like Kitakami's the superstar today, judging by the approving behavior of the other ship girls, especially Ooi. Looks like she's done her work superbly today.
I called Samidare and Sazanami, who luckily managed to escape without taking damage for today's mission, to my bedroom and showed them the teddy bear that I managed to win from the arcade, and they were so delighted that the two of them tackled me both and made me cough up some blood, for which they apologized profusely again. I didn't know whether to feel annoyed or amused by their reaction, but I guess that doesn't really matter now. I had them take it over to their dorm, where they'll hide it and give it to Inazuma tomorrow on her launch day.
Changed out my bandages just before sitting down to write this. I've been going to sleep early a lot these days to get myself to recover faster. Late-night anime and video games can wait.