Monday, March 17th, 2014.

Can't forget about tomorrow's birthday party.

This morning, Kiyoshimo had given me the luxury of eagerly reminding me of it. She asked me what kind of birthday present I'd give her.

Well...since I didn't actually plan on giving her an actual gift, I barely managed to dodge the question. She kinda knew what was going on, so for the rest of breakfast time, she kept pestering me, whining about why I wasn't getting her a gift. Inazuma overheard this, and she told me that if I could go to lengths to get her that Thor teddy bear, I could certainly get Kiyoshimo something nice.

Something nice, huh.

Kiyoshimo always blabs on about one day becoming a battleship. I mean...it's a stretch, but...

So after breakfast, once the girls were out for morning training to prepare for the sortie this afternoon, I sent an email to Seal Team Six. I informed them of my rather awkward situation and asked if there was anything they could provide, like perhaps an augmentation, that gives a destroyer battleship-status firepower. I don't really know if they can really come up with something, but it's the only gift that I think would truly satisfy Kiyoshimo. Other than head pats.

To my incredible surprise, this morning's supply drop included an Agusta-Westland Merlin transport helicopter that brought in a special shipment. Upon checking its contents, HQ actually sent over the equipment wish list I'd sent them the other day. Wow, what a pleasant surprise. Considering what I'd done to Takeda...surely they must know about it by now.

So now, I've got all the destroyers decked out with quadruple torpedo launchers, and both the heavy cruisers and aircraft carriers armed with 7.7mm machine guns to add to the fleet's overall anti-air capabilities. To be honest, they skimped out, 'cause I ordered 12.7mm AA guns, but I'm not gonna sit here and bitch. The fact that all the destroyers now have torpedo launchers alone is worth it, because previously, the fleet could only rely on the light cruisers and the submarines for torpedo support - but now, with all the destroyers equipped with torpedoes...you can fill in the rest. That being said, they're not as powerful or have as much range as Wakaba's and Samidare's quad oxy mounts, but still, they're torpedoes.

Still, the fact that I've found out nothing about the repercussions of Takeda's death worries me. It's like the feeling you get when the due date of a big project or a big test in school is just around the corner, and you haven't done anything to prepare. I don't want to make it sound like I'm suspecting Seal Team Six to be up to some shenanigans, but it kind of feels like it. I have all the reasons in the world to trust that they've got their own agenda to follow, but this is the military I'm in, and when you're in the military, you never quite know where your loyalties lie. The fact that Seal Team Six is a top-classified black ops task force within the American military doesn't help either. I'll keep my eyes and ears open for this.

Today's satellite images sent to me from HQ ascertained that the Abyssals are aggressively rebuilding Charlie District. By "repairing", they just seemed to be salvaging what's left of the last battle there. In addition, the incubation fields at Baker One got restored again over the weekend. It really looks like attacking Baker One will only buy us so much time for the fleet to not have to deal with the Floating Fortresses - they're always going to keep coming back.

So when it came to sortie time, I debriefed the fleet with the current status of Dog District and the layout of the district. I informed them that just looking at the size of the district compared to others, Dog District is clearly the heart of Sector B, and probably where the heart of the Abyssal bases is. Satellite photos can only tell us so much - the fleet needs to get in there and get the rest of the job done.

I gave them a strange mission today: I gave them two alternate primary objectives. The first objective was to sail to Dog One, along the northern side of Dog District, where a manufacturing plant was confirmed there already, and destroy the Abyssal defenses there and the territory - specifically, the plants along the shoreline. The second objective, if they so chose or the opportunity arose, was to capture a capital Abyssal, or a Heavy Cruiser Abyssal or any other Abyssal specimen stronger than that. One or the other - if the fleet saw a chance to complete the second objective at any time and successfully did so, they could return to base immediately.

The purpose of this mission was intended to be an intel-gathering mission for me so that I can plan another Operation Blackout mission soon. I sent the fleet off at 1300 hours, as usual.

I spent the afternoon quietly pondering the repercussions of what happened on Saturday. Now that I had some time to sit down and think, no matter how I look at it, the Japanese government will not be happy whatsoever that an American military officer just executed one of their people, especially someone from the Ministry of Defense. They won't care about the fact that Takeda was an extreme right-wing motherfucker and that he'd tried to put the entire Moebius Four Armament Pact in danger, all they'll give two shits about is the fact that if there's ever a chance to try to make a huge sensational fret about the Pact, it's now. I don't trust the Japanese government enough to not make a huge deal out of it - they won't let this one go unanswered.

Whether or not I'm just being paranoid, I went to find Houshou, Mamiya, and Irako in the kitchens and sat them down to tell them about what was going through my mind at the moment. I told them about Saturday, and that the political ramifications of it may come back to bite me in the ass later. I gave them the email address of Seal Team Six and told them that if anything were to happen to me, they needed to use the guest account on my personal computer in my room or any computer with internet access to notify the guys over at Seal Team Six to let them know what'd happened. Irako asked me whether or not I was just overreacting to this, that surely the government would understand that there'd been two attempts on my life already, one of which nearly succeeded. I just said that I was covering all bases - you just don't quite know what'll end up happening in my line of business.

The fleet returned shockingly fast at barely before 1700 hours, and to my surprise, they captured two Abyssal submarines and a light carrier, Ka-Class, Yo-Class, and Nu-Class, respectively. The short post-action mission report that Samidare, whom I made flagship, submitted stated that the recon planes the carriers sent out picked up a small transport squadron en route to Dog District from Charlie District, so they intercepted them without firing a shot and surrounded them, ordering them to surrender, which the Abyssals had no choice but to do so. Upon interrogating them, the girls found out that the Abyssals have been anticipating an assault on Dog District very soon, so they've been bolstering the defenses of all the territories there to prepare. So to make sure they weren't bullshitting, the fleet went over to Dog One anyway so that the carriers' recon planes could check the place from afar, and it turned out that the Abyssals they'd captured were right. If they were to attack then, they would surely take a lot of damage, maybe even a few fatalities if there happened to be another one of those capital Abyssal girls there. So Samidare made the executive decision to pull back, remembering what had happened to herself and not wanting someone else have to go through that, and they returned back to base immediately. They did let the unarmed transport Abyssal ships, the Wa-Class, go, but only after they'd confiscated the metal crates they'd been tugging along. Therefore, the fleet didn't take any damage, much less fire a shot, much to Suzuya's and Wakaba's great disappointment.

I met the captured Abyssals, the two submarine girls and the Nu-Class and introduced myself to them. I told them what the procedure was here, what ends up happening to the Abyssal prisoners we capture. Ka-Class asked me if that was why some of their own had ended up missing, and that our ship girls were suddenly becoming a lot stronger somehow in such a short period of time, because we'd been taking Abyssal girls like themselves in and studying them to augment our own fleet, and I said yes, for the most part. I said that unfortunately, the same thing would happen to them. They wouldn't be tortured or interrogated or anything bad, but they'd be studied by a team of researchers I was acquainted with so that we could learn more about them.

Ka-Class and Yo-Class remind me of the girl from the Ring, with their long wet black hair and whatnot. I thought Ka-Class looked badass, because she actually has a breathing mask or apparatus thing over her mouth. When I asked her about it, she said that she'd been the first successful Abyssal submarine, but she could only breathe underwater with the mask on, while the other submarine classes like Yo-Class had been constructed with genetic modifications to allow them to breathe underwater without the help of a mask and directly extract oxygen from the water they breathe. You'd think that a girl with a mask would be more shy than a girl without one, but in this case, Ka-Class was easier to approach and talk to than Yo-Class was. Strange how that works. Nu-Class has humanoid legs but an Abyssal torso and upper body, but surprisingly, he/she/it can talk, albeit not very well. It's like talking to someone who's trying to learn another language - I know that feeling when I was studying Japanese myself back in high school and at Hargraves.

As soon as the girls introduced the Abyssals to the docks, however, they haven't come out. They're still in there, I think. The girls reported that the submarines especially are infatuated with the docks, and apparently they said that they've never had anything like a warm-water dock back at home before, so the concept of a "bath" is completely new and foreign to them, but a welcome one at that.

After dinner, I joined the destroyers at Shinsengumi and played a few rounds of Mario Kart Double Dash with them, resulting in more salty shenanigans, but nowhere near the level of salt produced on Sunday, thank God. At least in Mario Kart, anyone can win at any point if everyone's near the same level of expertise, and because I'm not very good at driving games, the girls basically learned quick enough to be able to compete with me, so no one stayed super salty for long.

Shigure was there, watching us as Yuudachi got in on the action too. I suppose if Yuudachi's somewhere, I can always expect Shigure to be there too. So when my turn was up, I handed my controller off to Ikazuchi and sat with Shigure at the table she was sitting at. I asked her what she'd meant yesterday night, about how she hoped that she didn't want me to die, too. I asked her if she knew what was going to happen, in regards to what happened on Saturday. She shook her head, saying that that wasn't what she meant. I asked her what she meant, then, but she didn't answer right away. In fact, she didn't answer me at all. So I told the girls that I had to go back to the office to take care of some stuff, and that they shouldn't be playing past 2200 hours.

If Shigure won't tell me what's on her mind, maybe her profile will.

But when I checked her profile in my office, it didn't tell me much. However, it did mention that there was a "glitch" with her programming. That's all it mentioned. So I checked Yuudachi's profile, wondering if I could find out more about this "glitch", but there it was again on Yuudachi's profile, that Yuudachi, too, had a "glitch" with her programming. What the fuck is up with this glitch thing? And why the hell isn't it explained at all?

So I just decided to research their backgrounds on the Internet. And that's where I found out...

The real Shigure from the IJN survived every single battle she'd participated in during the war. And in lots of those battles, she was often the only one to come out of them unscathed, or even worse, the only one to survive. She'd been at Surigao Strait, or the Battle of Leyte Gulf, as we the Americans call it, where her entire fleet got shrekt, and Shigure basically only managed to escape just because Yamashirou, one of the battleships there, covered her retreat. This's something that'll be in every single war: that one guy, that one lucky sonuvabitch who never seems to get touched by anything because God or whoever decided that for whatever fucking reason, they'd get the best luck in the world and never have to worry about a thing.

But talking to Shigure, she doesn't seem like someone who considers herself lucky. Far from it, now that I know what she'd been through in her previous incarnation, she treats herself more of a bad luck charm to everyone around her.

Fear the Reaper girl, unless your name is Yukikaze, the Reaper of Ship Souls.

Too many video game references all from the same company.

I'm betting that the "glitch" that Shigure has is survivor's guilt. And as far as I'm concerned, that's no glitch.

Before I went to bed, I glanced at my email to check it one last time, and there, sitting in my inbox, was a single unread email. I opened it up, and all it said was:

"Challenge accepted."