Friday, March 7th, 2014.

Yamato was apparently feeling particularly happy today, because she served me a plate of apple slices that had super intricate designs carved into the apple skins. Like, super detailed designs. They almost remind me of medieval European coat-of-arms designs, they're that detailed. It's crazy. And considering that Yamato, given her size and height, has appropriately huge hands, that's actually really amazing that Yamato can pull off something like this. All the destroyers were especially awed and envious that Yamato could and would do such a thing for me. She even asked to feed me the apples myself so that I wouldn't have to hurt my arms, which, seeing that Yamato probably wanted to feed me too, ended up being her reward, in retrospect. Yahagi did look a bit bummed out that Yamato was feeding me apples.

I wonder what Colonel Kevinson and Lieutenant Colonel Kevinson would think of this.

Straight to business:

HQ sent different kinds of photos this time - night-vision photos taken during the middle of the night. Able Four, Baker Two and Baker Three, and Delta One to Three are all heavily lit up at night. The Abyssals're clearly working on something big, but they aren't working on them during the daytime for whatever reason, only at night. HQ also included a footnote, saying that they recommend sending the fleet on a pure night battle down to any one of those places, and that they would be sending reinforcements soon specifically for this upcoming night battle. They also recommended that I split up the fleet for that battle to attack multiple locations at once.

More reinforcements, you say. They better include Inazuma's sisters, otherwise I'll be heated.

So a big night battle, huh? The fleet's had a few night battles before, but never a dedicated night battle that starts at night.

And from Seal Team Six:

"Good news and bad news. The bad news first.

The people who're planning your second assassination attempt are on the move, if our sources are to be believed. A member of the Ministry of Defense, an ultra-right wing high-ranking guy called Heiichirou Takeda, gave the go-ahead on it sometime yesterday. Not only that, it's also going to be a military coup-d'etat - but they're not overthrowing the government, they're going to overthrow 'the American dictatorship of the honorable Japanese Navy' - in other words, you. Takeda himself's planning to replace you as commanding officer of the base there in Okinawa. It's going to be highly publicized, and the whole point of it's to provoke the American government as a sort of 'come at us' gesture. And if things go their way, they're going to manipulate the evidence to this incident to make it look as though the United States is the aggressor, and Japan will take the case to the United Nations, where there's pretty much no hope for the US to win the case from there, since no other evidence can be found other than the evidence that Takeda's guys are going to make up. And with that, Japan's pretty much free to do whatever the fuck they want with the naval personnel fleet, and likely they won't give two shits about the Abyssal threat that the fleet's supposed to combat.

Good news next.

We know exactly what's going to happen. On March 15, Takeda and his guys are going to pose as military inspectors and request permission to board the supply helicopters that HQ's going to send down there on that day with reinforcements and supplies and stuff. (We managed to convince them to send down those girls you requested, by the way, and you're welcome.) If they get denied access to board, they'll force their way on board with their status as Ministry of Defense members, since the Ministry of Defense holds precedence over the Bureau of Counter-Terrorism. They're going to fly down to Okinawa just like last time, armed to the teeth with military gear, mind you, that they've already snuck onto the helis, and they're going to rinse and repeat the last thing the other five guys tried to do.

Not only that, but we're going to fly over there to assist directly. Only we as Seal Team Six can do shit that's outside the realm of normal military protocol. And they won't ever know that we were there.

And if you want, you can choose to dispense some indiscriminate American justice yourself. Apparently, Takeda really wants to take your life himself, as he pretty much hates anything or anyone American. I doubt even if you said you'd leave, he'd let you leave in one piece. You have a sword on you, don't you? If you want, you can have an honorable duel with him while we hold everyone else down. We'll talk about it once we head out there.

We've got some more resources for another Kai upgrade. Reply to this as usual with the name of the girl you wanna upgrade, and we'll send our chopper on over.

And now, about the Abyssals.

Capturing the Armored Carrier Princess really did prove to be a huge gold mine of Abyssal intel. Holy shit.

Now, we know FOR SURE that the Abyssals are manufactured beings. Armored Carrier Princess is one of many, many Abyssal life forms that whoever's making the Abyssals is building over there at Sector B. In fact, she's the very first one, constructed at an island whose coordinates match Able Four's. And we intercepted that email that HQ sent you with the night-op photos showing all those glowing islands at night. There's no doubt that all those territories have construction plants or shipyards that're building powerful Abyssal life forms just like Armored Carrier Princess.

We've also figured out how to reverse-engineer the personal shielding that Armored Carrier Princess has. It seems like all major Abyssal ship types, from the light cruisers and up, have a special personal shielding field that allows them to tank a couple hits for free, but eventually it gets broken under sustained fire. I'm sure your ship girls know what I'm talking about. So now that we've figured out how to reconstruct the Abyssal shielding, we're going to include it in the Kai upgrade surgeries from now on. It's not an augmentation, just a feature, for a lack of a better word.

Speaking of augmentations, we've also used the data gathered from both He-Class, Floating Fortress, and Armored Carrier Princess. Not only did we figure out how to optimize the ship girls' system synergies to have the ship girls equip more than one augmentation, but we're also working on writing and developing augmentations specific to particular ship types, and, of course, more powerful augmentations. We're pretty excited about this, actually, and we ought to have some test samples ready for your girls to test the next time we send a chopper over.

Lauren, Losira, and Kane spend lots of time talking with Armored Carrier Demon. They've decided call her 'Jenna', and she seems to like the name, so we're calling her 'Jenna' from now on. They've found out that the person in charge of the Abyssals is part of a covert international terrorist group called 'The Inner Circle', and that the guy just goes by the name 'The Sheriff', which is pretty lame, to be honest. But she didn't know anything else beyond that. We've heard of the Inner Circle before, because they tried doing some shady nuclear arms trades back in 2010 to insurgents in Iraq and Iran, some of whom are part of the whole ISIS group today, and stirred some shit up in Rio De Janeiro back in 2011, but we didn't hear anything from them until now. Looks like we know what they're up to this time.

We'll keep you updated."

So we're starting to make a plotline behind all this now, huh? What am I in, the next Tom Clancy novel?

I sent them a reply email thanking them for the intel, and that I'd have the base on high alert. I also informed them that I in fact had three girls volunteering for the Kai upgrade: Wakaba, Akebono, and Suzuya.

Instead of sending the girls out on sortie today and to prepare them for the upcoming night ops, I gathered the girls at their normal sortie time and shared the news with them. I wanted them to use the afternoon to specifically prepare for the night ops next Monday, and that likely this would be the first in a series of nighttime operations against Sector B. The girls were pretty surprised and happy at the rare treat of not having to sortie for a reason that wasn't due to medical issues, so they did as I told them. However, I didn't tell them about the new reinforcements, since I wanted to keep that a secret from Inazuma for now to preserve the full surprise effect.

At dinnertime, I announced to the fleet about the intel I'd received about the second assassination attempt, and since Yahagi had already told me that the fleet was already aware due to the recent rumors, I was here to confirm that now, the rumors were true. I asked the girls to be on high alert from now until the incident is resolved or boils over, and because of this, the girls insisted that I have a bodyguard on me at all times just to be safe. At first, I refused, but the pressure from the girls was so great (even Houshou gave me her usual disapproving glares until I gave in) that I eventually let the girls organize a time table on who would be my bodyguard for whichever specific part of the day. I was surprised how quickly they made it, too, 'cause it barely took them half an hour. Seems like they're really, really enthusiastic about this.

Though, the only troublesome part with this whole bodyguard system's that the girls also insist on staying with me in my room. Now, judging by the blushes of some of the girls and the devious drooling of Suzuya, I can only imagine this means that I'll be spending some quality bed time for the next week or so. Oh dear.

Other than that, nothing else really important, I suppose. Today was a chill day, leading into the weekend. So just for shits and giggles, I brought my office laptop over to Shinsengumi and hooked it up to the projector, and I introduced Wakaba, Fubuki, Murakumo, Kiyoshimo, Akebono, Sazanami, Samidare, Shioi, and Imuya to the beautifully rage-inducing game called Super Meat Boy. And guess what, I made them play on the keyboard because we have no controllers yet.

Thank you, Team Meat, for giving me an entire night of horrible hilarity and a mob of fuming ship girls throwing the biggest temper tantrums I've ever seen.

I'm so fucking evil.

Oh, I nearly forgot to add the fact that now, Hatsuharu's spending the night with me in my room. And that also makes me realize that now, all the girls'll know that I keep a journal. Well, shit, rest in pieces my personal records of the past two months.

RIP IN PEPPERONIS I CRI ERI TIEM