Tuesday, March 4th, 2014.

I woke up (again) to Kuubo-Hime in Atago's spare pajamas (which Atago graciously lent Kuubo-Hime, thank God) sleeping next to me. Like, legitimately sleeping, not lying next to me waiting for me to wake up like a creep. I had to wake her up in order to get out of bed, and I asked her why she was sleeping if she said that Abyssals don't need to sleep.

"Because sleeping in a bed's a lot different from sleeping standing up," she said.

To that I say, "Well met!"

Dank memes again aside, she does have a point. Sleeping out in the rain in a military coat is way different from sleeping indoors, no matter whether you're in a sleeping bag or an actual bed.

I told her she could sleep on my bed some more if that suited her fancy, and that I'd have her breakfast saved in case she didn't make it to breakfast time, so she chose to sleep in. I hope she didn't think of any of the stereotypical perverted stuff that girls are depicted to do in other people's beds, like sniffing pillows and sheets and slobbering all over them 'n such. I can't imagine that Kuubo-Hime's the type, but I dunno...while it's convenient to think of Kuubo-Hime as just another regular ship girl by now (surprisingly), she's still an Abyssal, and Abyssals...well, looking at Re-Class, let's just say that some of 'em have a couple screws loose, and there's nothing to suggest that Kuubo-Hime doesn't have a few screws loose herself.

During breakfast time (everyone was there today, since all the critically injured ship girls had their surgeries done by now and recovered their missing limbs and whatever else, Suzuya sat next to me all willy-nilly, thinking that she'd monopolize me again today to feed me, but not so. To everyone's surprise, Souryuu challenged Suzuya's privilege to feed me and demanded that Suzuya take turns with everyone else who wanted to feed the Admiral (me) too. At this, Suzuya cried out that no one else but her deserved to feed me more than her, since she was partly to blame for my dislocated arms. She'd been the one who essentially captured Kuubo-Hime to begin with, too.

And then Souryuu said,

"You're wrong! Lots of us want to have a chance to feed Admiral too! Isn't that right, everyone? Raise your hand if you wanna try it for yourself!"

Sazanami, Samidare, Inazuma, Fubuki, Wakaba, Hatsuharu, Kiyoshimo, Imuya, Shioi, Akashi, Ooyodo, Takao, Atago, Yamato, and Shouhou all raised their hands. I saw Murakumo about to raise her hand, but she quickly put it down. Figures.

So they all started to challenge Suzuya's "right" to feed me, and because Suzuya knew that her monopolization of me was being threatened, Suzuya clung onto me and inadvertently rubbed her chest all up 'n down my right arm. Normally, I wouldn't mind, since I'm a straight guy, but when your arm's just been dislocated and popped back two days earlier, even the pleasurable weight of soft breasts can make your arm feel like flaccid jello that also feels like it's chewing your shoulder out from the inside. The other girls, especially the ones with...let's say, less well-endowed chests, jumped at this opportunity and cited this "inappropriate behavior" to kick Suzuya off her pedestal, and soon I found myself sitting in between Inazuma and Fubuki, and with Samidare, Kiyoshimo, and Shouhou on the other side all asking me if they could feed me while Suzuya sulked behind me into the open arms of Atago.

If I wasn't the center of attention of all this, I thought it would've been something straight out of a comedic slice of life anime, like Nichijou or something. But I guess I know why those shows and animes are funny, because we don't go through the same funny bullshit that they're subjected to. I wasn't amused by this in the slightest.

In fact, Inazuma got so overeager that out of sheer nervousness, when I finally accepted her offer to feed me some steamed rice from my platter, she accidentally jabbed the chopsticks right into my right eye. Thankfully, the sticky white rice protected my eye from being jabbed by the ends of the metal chopsticks, but...it's still gonna hurt no matter what you're hit by in the eye. Inazuma was nearly in tears right after that.

I wonder if Kuubo-Hime really does pose as big of a threat to me as I once thought. If anything, my fleet's gonna kill me out of kindness before Kuubo-Hime does anything to me, sexual or not.

This should be hilarious, but again, it's not.

After breakfast, the girls headed out for morning training and practice while I did the usual, but as promised, Ooyodo skipped training to help me with the paperwork. I said that she really ought to be out there training, since she has nowhere near the combat experience as the other ship girls, but Ooyodo just gave me one of those "what the fuck did you just say to me?" kind of looks that I know very well, having known my own military superiors back in America, so I decided that my past experience in dealing with those kinds of looks was still going to pay massive dividends with Ooyodo. In other words, I shut the fuck up and let her do what she wanted.

About an hour and a half into the paperwork, Ooyodo and I were interrupted by Takao marching Akebono inside my office. Takao said that Akebono had come to training an hour and a half late after disappearing mysteriously right after breakfast, and that Takao had caught her trying to sneak back to the destroyers' dorms, and that Akebono was sneaking something wrapped in plain construction paper taped together. So she brought Akebono over with the intent on having me open whatever Akebono was carrying around in front of everyone in the office. Akebono didn't seem too fazed by Takao's threat, but then again, she doesn't really care about getting in trouble to begin with anyway.

Ooyodo offered to open the thing for me, but I told her that I would do it. So I pulled off the construction paper, and inside was a small box of Japanese over-the-counter painkillers.

Obviously, I asked Takao to refrain from giving Akebono any punishments. Takao looked a bit guilty for yelling at Akebono, understandably, since everyone knew that I would be better off with at least some amount of painkillers for my arms. So I asked Akebono where and why she got these painkillers for me, and Akebono said that she'd snuck out of the base to buy them at a drugstore the next town over. Not the one near the base, but the next one. Kayo, I think its name was. She ran all along the coast over there to the drugstore there, since the town nearby doesn't have one, but she said that she didn't have a lot of pocket money, so all she could afford was the cheapest box of painkillers.

And as for why...

"It's annoying to see you being fawned over all the fucking time by everyone else at breakfast; it makes me sick, you shitty Admiral. Get better so that I don't have to see that crap every single day."

She didn't say it as harshly as you'd imagine.

But I asked her, why the construction paper? She could've just given it to me.

"I didn't want you to know that it was me who bought them for you. I'm not like the others, tryin'a get all mushy with you and tryin'a get your approval or anything, shitty Admiral. Lay off my case already."

She said this with such a straight and irritated face that it's hard for me to know if she's actually being tsun or if she really means that. Whichever the case, I thanked Akebono for her consideration and said that I'd take them right away. The weakest painkillers are the best kind, anyway, since it would bring my pain down to tolerable levels and not have a chance of getting me hooked. I sent Takao and Akebono back out to training, since no matter what Akebono did, that wouldn't serve as an excuse to skip training.

At 1000 hours, as usual, the same ol' Osprey flew into base at the Six-Pack to drop off Kiso, some extra copies of augmentations, and to pick up Kuubo-Hime. I woke up Kuubo-Hime, who was still sleeping in, and told her that I had a few people who'd come to pick her up, and initially, she looked confused.

"Where am I going?" she asked.

I told her that the reason why she'd been captured was because a research team that I was associated with wanted to study her in order to understand the Abyssals better, and at this, she looked terrified. She thought I meant that she was going to be researched in the sense that Seal Team Six would dissect her, subject her to all kinds of weird, twisted scientific "experiments", torture her, all the usual stuff that comes with being a prisoner nowadays.

"Why didn't you tell me this earlier!?" she asked.

I pointed out that it was her responsibility to ask me things like that beforehand as a prisoner. After all, I was perfectly willing to answer any of her own questions that she had, and she knew it, so she should've asked me what would become of her before today. I told her that she would be safe, that while I didn't know the exact details of what would happen to her, she would be tortured or put under any heavy duress. I least, I didn't think so.

"What do you mean, you don't think so!?"

I didn't answer that.

So we led her out to the Six-Pack, and Losira, Lauren, and another girl shorter than either of them met us there, handing us Kiso. They introduced the new girl as Kane, and they led Kuubo-Hime into the Osprey. I called out to them as Ooyodo went to show Kane where we keep our spare fuel reserves not to treat Kuubo-Hime badly, and Lauren assured me that Kuubo-Hime wasn't going to be sacrificed in the name of science or anything. The way she said that, though, was pretty suspect.

Lauren also informed me that with the arrival of the He-Class and Floating Fortress specimens, they were working on a really big breakthrough that, if successful, they would begin to implement into all future Kai upgrades for the rest of the ship girls I send over. She said that they needed to keep it a secret for now, but they'd let me know what it is once they feel like they can talk about it.

Before they left, Kuubo-Hime leaned out of one of the side passenger doors and called out,

"When can I see you again?"

Talk about pullin' at my heartstrings. If I wasn't in the military for all these years, that would've irked me a lot worse.

I told her that honestly, I didn't know. The people who were going to take care of her from now on would have a better answer for her than I did.

So let's talk about Kiso Kai, shall we?

Unlike her other ship sisters' new Kai loadouts, Kiso came with only a single quad torpedo launcher, but she now has access to using seaplanes that she can launch by herself. That's a bit misleading, because Kiso was always able to launch seaplanes, it's just that the capability for her to do so, for whatever reason like her right patched eye, was never given access; basically, a dead ability. But now that she has access to her programs that handle seaplane launches and whatnot, she's able to use a few recon planes of her own and manage them by herself, which is neat, since this means that Kiso can have a few recon planes up in the air covering any blind spots of the other carriers' recon planes.

But her main focus is on her right eye. Seal Team Six replaced the dud eye behind her eyepatch and instead replaced it with a bionic eye that they managed to develop using reverse-engineered Abyssal technology based on how the Abyssal destroyers' eyes worked, and that itself is her actual internal augmentation. It's really, really cool, and my inner geek was geeking out hard when Kiso showed me her new eye.

Kiso's new internal augmentation is divided into two parts. The first part is the eye itself that she received, which is called, appropriately enough, "Golden Eye". No obvious 007 references there, nope, sir, none at all. Her eye is basically an advanced targeting reticule: when Kiso uses her Golden Eye, her eye will scan the battlefield for all friendly and hostile signatures and highlight all hostiles with a red diamond background. It can also physically see the amount of time is left before a certain enemy is able to fire their weapons again, and the eye will see a timer above that particular weapon of the enemy, and this is projected over all hostile signatures, so Kiso can call out to friendlies when the next attack is about to come. It also automatically produces ballistics information programs for Kiso herself and for friendly ship girls at all the enemies in the surrounding area, effective for one shot only, that's easily able to be downloaded by friendlies and used to instantly lock onto the enemies for which the programs have been written. In essence, it's like having the first part of Kitakami's Weapon Pre-Igniter augmentation, but Kiso's eye automatically generates this information and makes it publicly available to all friendlies within 50 meters and downloading those ballistics programs basically only takes half a second. The only downside to this is that the range is rather short, and fifty meters in a fleet-versus-fleet scenario isn't impressive by any means. In addition, using the eye for more than five minutes at a time will actually worsen Kiso's eyesight directly because it'll start destroying the cells in her both of her eyes, not just her Golden Eye, if used longer than what's safe. But the amount of fleet synergy that Kiso's Golden Eye provides, even if it's for one volley, is worth these drawbacks, provided that Kiso makes sure not to go hard in the paint with her new eye.

The second part is her new ability, which is called Crackshot. A pretty...interesting name for an augmentation, but I won't question it, because basically all it does is allow Kiso to hone her targeting programs so much that her accuracy rate will be forced up to over 125%. Why over 100% accuracy? Because apparently, during the trial runs back at Seal Team Six's base, the Crackshot ability proved so strong that Kiso was able to consistently hit two or more targets with just one torpedo. The Crackshot ability not only gives Kiso one volley to score a guaranteed hit, but it's also very likely that her targeting program will look for a situation in which maximum damage can be achieved with one volley and find such a situation in combat. The only drawback to Crackshot is that it only works in conjunction with the Golden Eye when Kiso's using it. If the Golden Eye's covered up or too tired to be used, Crackshot will be offline. In addition, every time Kiso uses Crackshot, the time that she's able to have to use the Golden Eye get cuts down by like two minutes, so basically, Kiso has three potential Crackshots with a fully charged Golden Eye. But those three shots with perfect accuracy could be all that she needs to turn the tide of the battle into our favor.

For now, we're calling Kiso's internal augmentation Golden Eye, because it sounds cooler than Crackshot.

With that, I also got two extra copies of the Automated Reloader, and one extra copy of the Silencer, Mjolnir Cell Reinforcement, and Targeting Jammer augmentations. Unfortunately, no extra Waterfall Shield to replace the one that Murakumo lost.

Weren't these things supposed to be rare and expensive? How'd Seal Team Six manage to make so goddamn many? Well, whatever, I'm not complaining, since any one of these augmentations can mean all the difference between life and death for them.

The arrival of the new augmentation copies reminded me to ask the ship girls with augmentations to continue sending me feedback reports on their performances, especially those with the newer augmentations. I reminded the girls of this once I sent them out on sortie.

Once mission time came around, I gathered the fleet at the harbor, as usual by now. This morning's satellite photos from HQ indicated that curiously enough, Charlie District was being occupied a lot more than usual by Abyssal forces. While we didn't know what Baker District was exactly until I sent the fleet down there, Charlie District is an obvious giveaway. With two giant strips of land just arbitrarily sitting out in the deep blue sea like that, about six hundred meters long, those are obviously airfields, and the photos clearly showed the Abyssal light cruisers and about four Wo-Class carriers, two of them with normal teal-aqua eyes, one with red, and one with yellow, hanging out near those strips of land. The photo also showed lots of blurred vector lines - probably the Abyssal aircraft. I thought that those might be training sites for Abyssal aircraft, perhaps, so I decided to send the fleet down there today. Once the fleet agreed to the plan, I gave out the augmentations I received from Lauren and her fellow squadmates to whoever else still didn't have an augmentation. Murakumo got the Targeting Jammer to replace the Waterfall Shield she'd lost, Atago got one of the two Automated Reloaders, Shouhou got the Mjolnir Cell Reinforcement like the other carriers, Yahagi got the Silencer, and Ooyodo got the other Automated Reloader.

So with that, the fleet deployed down to Charlie District. Since those two big airstrips are all that's at Charlie District, there's no need to call out Charlie One or Charlie Two or anything of the sort.

Thinking about it now, why the fuck would Abyssal aircraft need land-based airstrips for training? That doesn't make sense...at all.

I spent the rest of the afternoon handling afternoon papers and sending emails where needed. Specifically, I sent Seal Team Six an email asking that they treat Kuubo-Hime well, since, to be honest, we kinda spoiled her here at base as a prisoner. Who the hell's ever heard of a Commander who lets a prisoner sleep in his own bed until ten in the morning? I also asked them what the deal was with all these augmentations, too, hoping that they'd get an answer back to me about that.

The fleet came back hella quick today, before dinnertime, even. Today's the record that they've been back from a full fleet-scale sortie.

Not a single ship girl took damage.

According to flagship Suzuya's post-action mission report (I gave her flagship to make up for what happened earlier in the morning), the Abyssals had their guard completely down. Sure, there was a lot of activity at Charlie District, but that was mainly in destroyers and carriers. There weren't any other ship types there, like light cruisers or battleships to provide the real meat of the damage, and because the aircraft was still training there by the time the fleet found them, Akagi, Souryuu, and Shouhou's attack planes massacred a huge chunk of the Abyssal aircraft before they knew what was going on. After that, Suzuya ordered a full-scale assault onto the two airstrips, no holds barred, and she and all the destroyers and light cruisers charged on in while the battleships, carriers, and the two other heavy cruisers stood back and shelled away. It was a complete slaughter, hardly deserving to be called a battle at all. But this is war, we don't show sympathy for the enemy while the shells're flying and blood's splattering. And objectively speaking, with this, Abyssal air power just got fucking trashed. There's no other way to put it, no easy way to put it. The fleet wrecked their capacity to obtain air superiority at all for at least the next few days, although we don't know how fast they can replace it.

I asked Mamiya and Irako to make Akebono whatever sweets that she liked, telling them about the incident with the painkillers earlier today. They wholeheartedly agreed, and they ended up making homemade grape gelatin, after dinner, which I gave to Akebono while she was hanging out at Shinsengumi playing Monopoly with Sazanami, Kitakami, and Ooi. (Ooi was obviously plotting with Kitakami.)

"If you wanna thank me properly," Akebono said when she took the jello, "gimme a Kai upgrade, you shitty Admiral."

So even Akebono has aspirations to become stronger, it seems.

Yamato was inside Shinsengumi's kitchen helping Houshou with some of the light refreshment dishes, and she stepped out to ask me some tips about cooking, because she wanted to improve her culinary skills, especially with Western dishes. A little bit later, Yahagi joined us too at Yamato's invitation, and we spent the rest of the evening discussing food and cooking. I brought up my intention to one day have a big Southern-style barbeque on a Saturday night, and Yamato and Yahagi volunteered their help to assist with it, since my arms still hurt like hell.

Never would I've thought that taking drugs was the best feeling in my life.