Friday, March 14th, 2014.
Lots happened today. Some good...some bad. Let's get to it.
The fleet sortied at 0400 hours, as planned. I stayed up the entire night so that I could send them off, and I went to sleep right away after they left.
Six hours later, at 1000 hours as usual, the same MV-22B Osprey came along. Houshou woke me up in my office, and we headed out to meet them. This time, to prepare for tomorrow, the entire Seal Team Six flew along, all well armed and prepared to deal with my assassination attempt tomorrow. Big, Sanford, Deimos, Losira, Lauren, Kane, Chuck, and Losira's brothers David (this's Commodore Sawatari) and Hank. And of course, Wakaba, Samidare, and Suzuya, all upgraded to Kai form, arrived too.
I completely forgot that Samidare had been picked up to be revived, and my memory of her was marred by her horrific death. I suppose I spent way too much time sitting next to her body in the medbay. So seeing Samidare running straight at me, arms open, as I emerged from the base made me take a step back in shock. Admittedly, I'm not used to seeing people whose bodies are torn in half come back to life. Well, then again, that's not something ordinary people should be used to. But case in point, Samidare gave me a big hug, and I reciprocated. I'm really glad Samidare's back; I didn't realize how much I missed her until I held her in my arms again.
Both Samidare Kai and Wakaba Kai had her main weapons switched out from a 12.7cm twin gun mount to a 10cm twin high-angle gun mount - smaller caliber, meaning a bit less stopping power, but much faster rate of fire, much better accuracy, and faster gun mobility, meaning that they can snap her aim to different targets much more quickly without having to wait for the gun barrels themselves to catch up and not have to move her whole body to help herself aim. They also boast quadruple oxygen torpedo launchers that fire 61cm torpedoes, and the launchers themselves hold up to sixteen torpedoes inside. This is'll be crucial, because this means my fleet no longer has to rely on purely the submarines or the torpedo light cruisers for all of its torpedo power. In addition, Big told me that their research branch over on the mainland should start weapon production for the ship girls, so I should expect a weapon catalog from HQ sent to me sometime soon so that I could look over the equipment lists and order whatever I saw fit for the girls to equip. I know what I'm getting for the destroyers, first thing I get my hands on that catalog.
Suzuya Kai got converted from a heavy cruiser into an aviation heavy cruiser, meaning that like Kiso Kai, Suzuya can now launch planes. Just like Kiso, Suzuya already had plane-launching capabilities, but for whatever bloody reason that will probably be forever a mystery, Suzuya just couldn't access those programs that facilitated plane-launching before, and the Kai surgery unlocked that capability now. She's kept her good ol' 20.3cm twin gun mount, but she's now got an external radar module called the Type 21 Air Radar, which is like a much weaker version of the Long-Range Scanners augmentation, but nonetheless a great boost to Suzuya's anti-air and enemy detection abilities. Its most important function, Big explained to me later, was to alert Suzuya of enemy recon planes, so that Suzuya can take them out or have other ship girls take them out to prevent the enemy from having eyes over the fleet. And because her air-launching capabilities have been unlocked, she came equipped with her own bomber planes, called Zuiuns (瑞雲, or Auspicious Clouds) and her own flight deck like the carriers, though it's nowhere near the full length of a standard carrier flight deck, understandably. Suzuya told me that she has enough space for either another set of planes or another weapon system, so I'll have to keep that in mind for later.
Big informed me that with their research on Kuubo-Hime and the Abyssal specimens we've captured for them to study, they've finally managed to figure out how to make it so that the ship girls can now equip more than one augmentation with all future Kai upgrades, as he'd mentioned in one of his previous emails. This means that Samidare Kai, Wakaba Kai, and Suzuya Kai all can use two augmentations instead of one, which is really cool and awesome. Speaking of new augmentations...
Samidare now has an internal augmentation called "Water Will", and I don't know how it works, but it essentially gives her telekinetic control over water or any form of liquid with roughly the same or lighter density than water. Big told me that this augmentation initially started out as an improvement to Murakumo's Waterfall Shield augmentation, but it ended up becoming way more developed and eventually became its own augmentation. It's a passive augmentation, thankfully, and with it, Samidare and use water as a defensive or offensive measure, and the best part is that she can use water to her imagination's desire to do whatever she wants.
Wakaba didn't come with her own internal augmentation, surprisingly. What she did receive, however, was a significant upgrade to her memory handling capacity and internal multi-tasking processing power. In other words, Wakaba can equip up to not just two, but three augmentations, which is insane. I guess it's just a matter of picking the best combination of augmentations we got, once we get a good stockpile of spare augmentations.
Suzuya received the Heavy Repeater augmentation, an augmentation type-specific to the heavy cruisers. Note that I didn't call it an internal augmentation, because it's not like the other internal augmentations that's loaded directly into the ship girls' main processing units. Instead, Seal Team Six took Suzuya's 20.3cm twin gun mount and upgraded it by strengthening it, both in terms of its physical endurance and its firing capacity, so Suzuya's 20.3cm guns are her new augmentation. So technically, it wouldn't be incorrect to call her weapons Heavy Repeaters. The Heavy Repeater augmentation added multiple barrels like Minigun barrels to Suzuya's 20.3cm twin gun mount, so each barrel got turned into a set of four barrels each, giving Suzuya a total of sixteen barrels. This means that with a single volley, if all barrels are loaded and ready to fire, Suzuya can fire sixteen rounds in only two seconds, if she so chooses. This is pretty much the perfect augmentation for Suzuya, who quickly got a reputation in the fleet, from what I've heard, as a trigger-happy ship girl with a frighteningly good aim for someone who's trigger-happy. Indeed, Suzuya was giddy with excitement - she told me she couldn't wait to go out to sortie to put her new augmentation in a live combat test. And since Suzuya still has her Silencer augmentation that she took with her, her first strike potential is amazingly good, almost as good as Kitakami's first strike potential, if not as good or even better. Suzuya's become one scary motherfucker now.
And let's not forget, the Kai upgrades that Samidare, Wakaba, and Suzuya got gave them personal shielding just like the Abyssal capital ship girls - essentially a bonus perk for free, more or less.
And as per usual, Seal Team Six delivered their new batch of freshly built augmentations. There's only one new augmentation, but they brought over some more copies of existing augmentations to make up for it.
The new augmentation is called "Blind Eye", just like that perk from the Call of Duty series. I forced Big to admit that he so totally stole the name, and he said the team had been playing some private Modern Warfare 2 lobbies recently for fun during their off-times. So if you've ever played Call of Duty multiplayer, you should know what this's all about. If you haven't, the Blind Eye augmentation renders the user completely invisible to all enemy aircraft, so the user no longer has to worry about being targeted by enemy dive bombers or fighter planes. We don't know if Abyssal recon planes have live feeds like our own recon planes do, but then again, since we already know that the Abyssals have a form of hive-mind telecommunication, they probably don't have any need for something like a live feed anyway, so most likely Abyssal recon planes can still see the user. But the important thing is that airborne attacks are for the most part no longer a concern, only the splash damage from torpedoes or bombs and the crossfire of fighter plane machine gun fire. As cool as this is, the problem is that if someone uses this, this means that someone else is going to get targeted by enemy planes and hit, so unless I equip the entire fleet with Blind Eye augmentations, this augmentation means that someone else's just gonna end up getting hit in the place of another. Therefore, I think Blind Eye is really only useful on destroyers and maybe light cruisers, since the amount of protection they'll receive is much greater than if other ship types equip it. Heavy Cruisers, Battleships, and Carriers can all take a hit or two from planes - destroyers and light cruisers are far more susceptible to a single well-placed and critical bomb strike.
We also received one more copy of the Automated Reloader Mk. II, the Targeting Jammer Mk. II, and the Silencer augmentations. Big promised me that the next time we received augmentations, we'd get a whole batch of 'em. Guess I'll look forward to that.
I looked over my previous augmentation list and found a few errors, so I took some time fixing it. This's the new and revised roster with their equipped augmentations:
(DD) Murakumo (External Cloaking Field)
(DD) Sazanami (Cell Reactor Booster)
(DD) Samidare Kai (Water Will)
(DD) Inazuma (Automated Reloader)
(DD) Fubuki (Atalantian Reactor Booster)
(DD) Akebono (Psionic Scrambler Mk II)
(DD) Wakaba Kai (Automated Reloader, Blind Eye, Targeting Jammer Mk. II)
(DD) Hatsuharu (Targeting Jammer)
(DD) Kiyoshimo (Overclock)
(SS) I-168 Kai (Silencer)
(SS) I-401 (Silencer)
(CL) Kitakami Kai (Weapon Pre-Igniter)
(CL) Ooi Kai (Targeting Jammer Mk. II)
(CL) Akashi (Mjolnir Cell Reinforcement)
(CL) Ooyodo (Automated Reloader)
(CL) Yahagi (Silencer)
(CL) Kiso Kai (Golden Eye/Crackshot)
(CA) Takao (Automated Reloader)
(CA) Atago (Automated Reloader)
(CA) Suzuya Kai (Silencer, Heavy Repeater)
(BB-X) Kirishima (Automated Reloader Mk. II, )
(BB-X) Hiei (Automated Reloader Mk. II)
(BB) Yamato (Automated Reloader Mk. II)
(CVL) Shouhou (Mjolnir Cell Reinforcement)
(CVL) Houshou (reserve force)
(CVN) Souryuu (Mjolnir Cell Reinforcement)
(CVN) Akagi (Long-Range Scanners)
A bit of time after Seal Team Six landed, the supply helis, coming a bit later than usual today, finally delivered those old refurbished consoles I ordered some time ago, a week ago, actually. I put them in Shinsengumi and put them away with the other board games in the back for the time being.
I spent the next hour or so going over the plan for tomorrow. Seal Team Six is going to find good hiding spots to provide overwatch on the base, overlooking the Six-Pack and the base around there, and set up in their positions about half an hour before Takeda and the Japanese right-wingers arrive. When they demand to see me, I'll come out, and Takeda will surround me with his men and order me to face him in a duel, since I'll come out with my sword and my handgun. But before I comply, Seal Team Six will eliminate all the right-wingers, leaving only Takeda alive, and depending on whether he's armed with a firearm, Seal Team Six will take him out too. If he's not, then they'll give me the choice of deciding what to do with him.
This is for the record: I don't know who Takeda is, and I don't know if he's got family he needs to take care of.
But I'm going to kill him if I get the chance.
After we put the plan down, I gave Seal Team Six a quick tour of the base, since some of them already know the layout of the base already. We hung out at Shinsengumi, and I helped Houshou serve our guests her signature Hakata ramen, which we all enjoyed with some Ramune and some light beer until the fleet arrived back to base.
Lots of casualties with this mission:
Murakumo, Sazanami, Inazuma, Fubuki, Hatsuharu, Kitakami, Shioi, Imuya, Ooi, Ooyodo, Yahagi, and Takao were moderately damaged.
And everyone else - Akebono, Kiyoshimo, Akashi, Kiso, Atago, Kirishima, Hiei, Yamato, Shouhou, Souryuu, and Akagi were heavily damaged.
At least, at the very least, there were none critically damaged. But the fleet was in a pretty wretched shape when they came back at around 1600 hours. I read the post-action mission report with Big, Sanford, Losira, and Deimos in my office that Hiei submitted to me before heading off to the dockyards.
As I feared, the Abyssal fleet this time around was much more prepared for the fleet, but the fleet still managed to catch them off guard because of the really weird timing of their attack, as I'd hoped would happen. Even still, the Abyssals put up a much fiercer fight this time around - they probably remembered the last time my fleet rolled around to Charlie District. It was a straight up battle, nothing complicated or anything, and the girls fought well, but the Abyssals' strategy, as it appeared, was to target the fleet's capital ships, specifically the battleships and carriers, and that was the battle that dealt moderate damage to the battleships and carriers, but they did manage to destroy a lot of the Abyssal carrier force stationed at Charlie District and their escorts and forced the remainder to retreat. Not a complete wipe like last time, but still a lot of damage dealt nonetheless.
At that point, Hiei called the fleet together and took a group vote to decide whether or not the fleet wanted to proceed on with their objectives I set out for them or to simply return to base. The problem was the battleships and the carriers: given their damage sustained at that point, it was possible that they could be killed and possibly sunk at Baker District. And if a battleship gets killed, it takes three destroyers to tow her body and her deployed weapons away, or two light cruisers, or a single heavy cruiser. A dead carrier only takes two destroyers or two light cruisers or one heavy cruiser, but still, if any of them did get killed in combat, that would mean that even more ship girls would have to be out of commission to make sure the bodies didn't sink and get lost forever.
But despite this, the fleet ended up voting to proceed with the operation, and they hit Baker Three, Baker Two, and Baker One in that successive order. Abyssal defenses at Baker District was really strong, and at each territory, the fleet took progressively worse and worse damage, so by the time they reached Baker One, the fleet was running on fumes, and everyone was bleeding profusely somewhere from some kind of bad injury. But being the troopers they are, they forged on.
But at Baker One, they encountered briefly a small girl running around in the Floating Fortress incubation buoy fields. At first, my fleet didn't believe their eyes, but their eyes weren't deceiving them. We looked over photos that the girls took of, and sure enough, it was a little girl running around on the water.
Like, what the fuck? Okay, I guess...?
But when she saw the fleet approach, she gave them a blank stare and ran away. The fleet didn't know how to react, whether they should really shoot at a little girl, so they just let her go. They destroyed the incubation fields once again, since they'd already defeated the vast majority of the Abyssal forces in the area, and returned to base from there.
That little girl...oh man, I think we all agreed that something was really off here. Whoever that little girl is, and whatever the hell she was doing at Baker One, her existence doesn't fare well for us in any way whatsoever.
In any case, the fleet docked to repair themselves, and afterwards, they ate some light dinner and went straight back to sleep in the dorms. Once the Seal Team Six guys went off doing their own thing preparing for tomorrow, I spent a few hours catching up with Samidare, who had a joyful reunion with an extremely relieved and happy Inazuma when the latter returned from the sortie.
Samidare confessed that when she came to in Seal Team Six's labs over at the West Coast, she thought she had ended up in hell or something, or in a cold, dark place that she must've ended up in after she'd died. Big had to settle her down, convincing her that she was just revived and would be going back to base. She herself didn't realize how much she missed her friends and me, her Admiral, until she woke up there. She said she was still being haunted by her memories of the last few moments before she got killed, the bone-chilling feeling of "Shit, I'm going to die" when she realized that she was being targeted by Battleship Symbiotic Hime. She said that she still could feel where the shells struck her. Her death wasn't really painful, because she was killed before she even had a chance to process what had happened, but the dull sensations of the shells punching her was still vivid in her mind.
Since we were sitting in my room with some cups of tea and we were by ourselves, I sat her down next to me on the couch and put my arm around her shoulders. I told her that she no longer needed to worry about her death anymore, now that she was reconstructed and revived. And if she had any nightmares that she was too embarrassed to go to her friends to talk about, she could always come to me and spend some time with me if that would make her feel better. I also apologized to her, because it was entirely possible that my misjudgment on the combat strategy for that mission was the reason why she ended up dead.
For that, Samidare gave me a small kiss on my cheek, which was a bit embarrassing, but it made me pretty happy, I'll be honest. Like I've mentioned repeatedly, since I've taken a liking to Samidare as a person, it felt nice. Samidare said that it wasn't my fault - that it was no one's fault, just how things ended up happening. We spent the rest of the night in my office together, drinking some tea and talking, and the whole time, Samidare held my arm.
I want to do everything I can to not see Samidare end up dead again. I feel that way for all the ship girls, even for Kitakami, but especially for Samidare.