Thursday, March 13th, 2014.

This morning, I decided to change up my schedule just for today. I asked Ooyodo, my secretary ship, to handle the paperwork like she'd done while my arms were out of commission from getting dislocated and leave the most important ones on my desk for me to take care of in the afternoon. There's this lot next to the Six-Pack that looks like it was once a small firing range, but for whatever reason it's been paved over like halfway, and then whoever was renovating it just stopped and ditched their work. Talk about sloppiness.

So after breakfast, I took my guns out for a spin. I borrowed Akashi from the workshop for a moment, and we nailed some steel plates into wooden posts at the end of the lot next to the Six-Pack. From there, I spent about an hour and a half practicing my marksmanship. Can't ever be too prepared.

Never imagined that there would come a day that I'd be forced to defend myself with small arms in my own base again. I thought that only happened at Hotel Bravo in the middle of Afghanistan. Then again, now that we know that an Abyssal invasion onto land is possible and a viable threat, I've been half-expecting to get bombed during the middle of the night and get killed in my sleep, World War II-style. Confessions of a classified naval base commander, I suppose.

But hey, soldiers are the one type of people who are best to respond to situations that go to absolute shit. It's our job, and we sometimes have to deal with it every day. We're just naturally good at sorting out shit that's been FUBAR'd so bad that everyone else would be running for their lives.

But enough with soldier problems.

As mentioned yesterday evening, I had the advance recon fleet head out at 1100 hours. With Akagi's Long-Range Scanners, I shouldn't have had to worry about them getting caught out in the open and getting ambushed. But nothing's guaranteed.

After lunchtime, I headed out to the main docks to check on the condition of some of the storage hangars, since Akashi asked me to check on them to pay her back for her assistance with setting up the small firing range. I found Atago and Inazuma sitting together at the end of one of the piers, so I was about to go out and see what's up, but then I realized that they were sitting in a more intimate way than I'd thought, so I left them alone. Atago gives off the whole motherly vibe, kind of like Houshou, so I can imagine what's happening. Even still, that's a strange duo there.

Or is it?

I had Hiei and Kirishima come to my office so I could brief Hiei on her role as flagship. Hiei, incredibly enough, actually didn't take my decision to make her flagship for a crucial mission seriously, so once she realized what kind of shit she was already knee-deep in by the time she entered my office and Kirishima shut the door, she gave her signature cry of "Hieeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" or something like that and tried to escape, but Kirishima, thankfully, detained her. Hiei tried to apologize her way out of being flagship, saying that she was terrified of having such a huge responsibility imposed on her.

I just told her, well, that really sucks, doesn't it. At least she won't have to worry about Japanese ultranationalists waltzing into base in two days trying to kill her just because she's an American.

So we spent about two hours briefing Hiei, but at the time, since the recon team hadn't come back, it was all tentative and hypothetical theory-crafting. If this happens, do this, if that happens, do that. What if this, then do this. That kind of stuff. Covering all bases, going over all options.

Nothing else really eventful happened after our little flagship orientation course ended until after dinner. After coming back to my office to finally get around to doing that paperwork that Ooyodo had left for me (which was really late by that point), I checked my email and found another unread email in my inbox from Seal Team Six. But instead of a body of text, there was only a few attached satellite photographs, and I could tell they weren't the same government satellite photos that HQ's been feeding me.

They were aerial photos of Charlie District, the site with the two airstrips. It didn't take me long to realize that all the lights that I was seeing in the photos all over the airstrips and the waters surrounding them are explosions.

The Abyssal fleet's got their carrier task forces back.

Fucking hell, our window's gone.

At 1900 hours, the advance recon team came back with no problems. I had the carriers come to my office and report on what they'd been able to see, and they confirmed that Charlie District was once again active with enemy carrier activity, so they stayed way clear of the place. Able District has been totally abandoned - they only saw a few Abyssal destroyer patrols in the area, so now it's almost completely safe to assume that Able District is neutralized. Baker District, however, is once again teeming with activity. The Abyssals reestablished their Floating Fortress incubation farms, and reconstruction's currently going on at Baker Two and Baker Three. This means they're not giving up those manufacturing plants, and this also might mean that the Battleship Symbiotic Hime that wrecked Samidare the other day is too powerful not to keep producing.

So Tl;DR: Able District is neutralized, Baker District is on high alert and dangerous, and Charlie District is extremely dangerous.

I brought the team into Shinsengumi again to debrief them on their next Operation Blackout mission. The fleet is to sortie tomorrow at 0400 hours and travel at max cruising speed towards Charlie District. Our highest priority right now is to neutralize Charlie District again. If we can keep eliminating their air presence, the Abyssal fleet will constantly spend even more time and resources rebuilding their carrier forces, since you can't have an effective fleet without any carriers providing any semblance of air superiority. If they manage to neutralize Charlie District once more, then they're to move onto Baker District. Their top priorities at Baker District is to destroyer Baker Three, Baker Two, and Baker One in that order. I don't want them to have the capability to produce another Battleship Symbiotic Hime again who can rip apart a destroyer with a single volley.

However, I added that I wanted the carriers and battleships to be on high alert for any signatures that felt like they were capital Abyssal ships, like Kuubo-Hime or Symbiotic Hime. The biggest mistake of the last Operation Blackout mission was the fact that those Abyssal capital ships were never taken into account. I ordered the fleet to treat those enemies as top-threat priorities, and that I specifically forbade any single ship girl from engaging any target like that one-on-one. That, and I also added that I was fully not expecting tomorrow morning's assault on Charlie District to go anywhere near as well as the first time around, when the fleet just absolutely molly-whopped them. I told them to behave as though the Abyssals already knew they were coming.

After adjourning the debriefing, I told the fleet to go to sleep soon for tomorrow's sortie, and that they had to be in bed by 2200 hours. But I headed over to my office and stayed there, sitting in my chair doing the Gendou pose, reconsidering all options and trying to dissect my own strategy, attempting to debate myself as to why anything needs to be changed. I spent nearly half an hour doing that, sitting in my office at my desk with the lights off, but I couldn't come up with any reason convincing enough to tell me that there was a better combat strategy than the one I'd issued to the fleet.

Surprisingly, Ooi came into my office to ask me if anything was wrong. She told me that she'd sensed my presence inside my office while passing by, even though she didn't see any lights coming through the cracks of the door, so she wanted to know what I was doing. I explained to Ooi what I was doing, trying to be my own critic and see if I was telling the fleet to do anything blatantly stupid.

I developed a habit of secluding myself in an enclosed space or a dark place whenever situations like this arose, where I needed to make a critical decision that will affect other people. I like to think that my relative loneliness as a middle school and high school kid during my youth, my dark, sarcastic attitude, and lack of peers and good parents who provide constructive criticism are all factors as to why this habit of mine came to be: the secluding of myself, my self-deprecating, bitter humor and sarcasm, and thus my tendency to criticize myself the harshest out of anyone whom I have criticisms for. And the darkness makes it so that I can't see or have a sense of myself, so that I can feel like my consciousness can truly be free of my own ego and think objectively. It's like an out-of-body experience that isn't so...out-of-body, if you know what I'm trying to get at. Is it a skill? Is it a habit? I don't really know myself. Like cigarettes, it's just something that I do. I don't smoke, though.

Maybe it's just a way to prepare myself for the rest of the world's criticisms when the decisions I make end up going badly for everyone else involved.

That's what I explained to Ooi, anyway. I told her not to worry about it.

Ooi said that nobody could be their own best critic. That's why she and the rest of the fleet were there, to tell me if they thought anything that I told them to do was wrong or could be done differently. The fact that they've never really had to object to any of my orders pertaining to combat and strategy meant that for the most part, the fleet considered my decision-making sound, reasonable, and reliable.

She also added that she couldn't stand me talking like this. At first, I thought that I was giving her the impression that I was trying to be all self-deprecating to appear like a pathetic, whining little bitch, so I apologized, saying that such wasn't really my intention. If you gotta get something off your chest, sometimes, you just gotta do it.

But she said that wasn't it. She said that she couldn't stand me talking like this because I was making her feel like utter crap. She said bitterly that she'd tried to do things on her own, live her own life out on her own accord, but every time she'd tried, she'd never been able to progress far. She was scared of not knowing what the future would hold, scared of doing things improperly or incorrectly and thus getting laughed at and ridiculed or even hated, and that every time she felt this way, she simply fell back to the one girl who provided the foundation for her self-esteem, Kitakami. Ooi never showed this side of her to anyone else, and I wasn't even aware Ooi had thoughts like this before. She said that even though I was just a mere human, an American commander, at that, at least I was strong enough to be my own critic. Ooi said that all she ever does is go stuff her face into Kitakami's chest whenever things weren't going the way they should.

I asked if Ooi knew what had happened between me and Kitakami during the days immediately following her first death, about a month ago or so. She did, Kitakami had told her all about it. Ooi herself was pretty shocked that Kitakami actually felt that way about her, because Ooi was the one who usually goes all apeshit ham over her, not the other way around. Although she wasn't really happy with me at how I treated Kitakami, the fact that I was able to overlook whatever hostilities there were between us and put both her and Ooi through the Kai program to make sure neither of them would have anywhere close of a chance of dying in combat again was more indicative of me as a person.

Ooi told me that I wasn't a bad Admiral. Not bad at all.

Before Ooi left my office, I called after her, asking her what I ought to do to go from just a "not bad" commander to a "good" one.

She just told me to figure that out for myself.

So much for that, then.