Tuesday, March 18th, 2014.

Ka-Class, Yo-Class, and Nu-Class ended up staying in the docks the entire night - they didn't want to leave the place. I had the girls tell them that we would have a team come to pick them up for research, like I'd warned them.

I sat with the destroyers this morning at breakfast time and asked them how they liked their new torpedo launchers, and all of them said they loved them. Ever since Wakaba had come along with her Kai upgrade and showed off what she could do with her quad oxygen torpedo launcher, all the destroyers wanted torpedo launchers for themselves. Murakumo said that she was about to storm into my office if I hadn't gotten them their own torpedo launchers as soon as I did to demand their own anyway. So that's great to know. The only gripe they had was that Samidare's and Wakaba's torpedoes fire oxygen torpedoes, which are more powerful than standard 53.3cm torpedoes, so there's that.

In addition, the other ship girls besides the destroyers are a bit miffed at the fact that I got extra equipment for the destroyers only, and Shioi complained to me that I was only focusing on the destroyers, that it wasn't fair for them to get good stuff but not the rest of the fleet. I tried to explain that I'd sent HQ a full equipment list that I wanted them to send here to base, which included new gear for everyone, not just for the destroyers, and that it just so happened that they sent the destroyers' quad torpedo launchers first, but they wouldn't have any of it. Hiei accused me of being a "destroyer-con", which I denied quickly, saying that because I was American, I believed in treating everyone equally and fairly, just that the circumstances didn't allow me to do so.

Unfortunately, Samidare and Kiyoshimo, who were sitting next to me, rose up to my defense, arguing that Hiei was just jealous that the destroyers happened to get their equipment first, and that Hiei should go back to being the sis-con that she is for Kongou, who's the namesake ship of her class. Hiei yelled at Samidare to bugger off, and Samidare threatened to "accidentally" friendly fire her at training again. This pissed Hiei off for some reason, and prompted to action, Hiei grabbed her spoon from her miso soup bowl and hurled it at Samidare, who quickly and instinctively ducked behind me. The problem was, Hiei tracked Samidare as she ducked behind me, so she threw her spoon right at my head instead. So now I have a spoon-head-sized bump on the right side of my head.

Yeah...I guess my own fleet really will end up killing me one day on accident. But that's alright; it's better than getting assassinated by some political extremist group.

Kirishima chewed the fuck out of Hiei after Akashi and Ooyodo made sure that the spoon that Hiei threw at me didn't do any serious damage, like fracture my skull or anything of the sort, since given a battleship girl's power, that could've easily happened. Kirishima even requested that I put some kind of punishment onto Hiei to make her learn not to impulsively act on her whims, that my lax grip over fleet discipline needed to change. I agreed with the punishing Hiei part, but not with the controlling the fleet with an iron fist part. So since we were going to hold birthday parties for Wakaba, Kiyoshimo, and Hatsuharu later today, I told Hiei that I expected her to do the dishes by herself after the parties were done for the day. FYI: Hiei hates doing dishes, so she was quite angry about that, but she knew she couldn't object.

Surprisingly, Seal Team Six didn't show up at 1000 hours like they usually do. They did show up later, but I'll get to that in a moment here. After breakfast, morning was business as usual - take care of papers, send emails, all that stuff while the fleet is out training. However, just before lunchtime, I got an email from Seal Team Six. It was short, but Big told me not to send my fleet out on sortie until they arrived, which he estimated would be around 1400 hours. That threw a wrench in my plans, but it doesn't matter, since I was only planning on sending the fleet on a recon mission to observe Abyssal fleet movements around Dog District. So I headed out to the training piers to meet the girls as they docked to inform them that I'd just received an email from our friends over at Seal Team Six telling me that I should delay their sortie by about an hour or two, so they could just stand by until then.

I headed back to my office to make a spreadsheet of my current roster of ship girls, their current model status (remodeled or not with Kai), their currently equipped augmentations, and weapon/equipment lists. I like to keep things organized - it's a quality that honestly all military officers should have but most don't. That's just one of the sad truths about the world - and somehow, even despite that, militaries somehow still work. Imagine if everyone was super-duper organized. Wouldn't that be a beauty, huh.

Just for a change of pace, since this was my own work I was working on and not paperwork or emails, I turned on my stereo set and hooked up my laptop to it to pump some music from my EDM playlist. I've been listening to a lot of EDM and electronic music in general these days, good stuff. When Robot Love by Klaypex ft. GRETA came on, I started bumpin' to the beat, singing along to the lyrics like I was singing karaoke in my own office. I do that sometimes, getting a bit too into the music I'm listening to and end up focusing more on the music than what I'm supposed to be working on. Hey, I can't help it, I'm musically inclined, what do you want me to say.

In fact, I got so into it that Samidare entered my office just before the second verse of the song started, and even though I noticed her come in, I didn't bother to stop. Just one of those moments where nothing else really matters. So Samidare watched me sing along to the rest of the song while I typed away at my laptop. And then I felt really awkward when the song was over and I paused the playlist. But of course I didn't show that to Samidare.

Surprisingly, Samidare complemented me on my singing. She said that my voice was a lot better than what I'd initially shown during our karaoke party a long time ago. She asked me if it was because I was a lot better at singing English songs, or just songs that I was familiar with, and I said probably. She also said that she really liked the song that I just sang along to, and she asked if I could play it again. So she sat on my desk as the song played through again. After the song was done the second time, she asked me if she could perhaps spend a day on a weekend or sometime to listen through my music with me, because the few times she'd heard me play music in my office, she really liked the kinds of music I listened to. So I asked her if this Saturday was alright, and she said yes. That'll give me some time to prepare a playlist just for her.

Besides that, Samidare told me that Mamiya had sent her to tell me that we were missing the ingredients for my chocolate pound cake, that I'd need to go out to the nearby town to pick up some ingredients. She offered to go and buy some for me with the girls, but I wouldn't have that. Instead, I suggested that I go with her and her ship sisters, Shigure and Yuudachi. At this, Samidare's smile got wiped off her face, and I picked up on this right away, asking her if she was on bad terms with them. Samidare explained that it wasn't that she was on bad terms with them, necessarily, but just that Shigure and Yuudachi felt like they were a bit too distant for them to feel truly like sisters. If I interpreted Samidare's meaning correctly, it's like to Samidare, Shigure and Yuudachi are those cousins you have whom you don't speak to very often, like family members you just know you have but never really get to know. Well, I told her, now would be the day that she'd break the ice with them.

So after lunch, I took the three of them over to the nearby town to pick up the necessary ingredients. Yuudachi was super excited, just like a frantically excited puppy, to be heading outside, and I seriously considered just leashing her up, seeing how she was going around investigating everything. Geez, how hyperactive can one girl get. As we were walking into town and into the supermarket, I asked them why they had different uniforms, even though they were part of the same ship class, but none of them had an answer - they didn't even know themselves. Maybe that's one of the reasons why Samidare didn't feel that they were truly ship sisters, and judging by their limited interactions, it seemed Samidare was right. Yuudachi got along well enough with Samidare, but Yuudachi paid a lot more attention to Shigure than to Samidare. Samidare gave a me a couple looks throughout trip to town that said "See? I told you" whenever I glanced at her.

I did pick up an old-fashioned Japanese fan for Hatsuharu, though, since I knows she likes that fan of hers, before we returned back to base. And when we did start heading back to base, I saw the familiar Osprey land at the Six-Pack.

Big and Lauren got Ka-Class, Yo-Class, and Nu-Class on board with the promise that there would be hot baths like the ones we had here where they were being taken to. Then, after we got them aboard the Osprey, Big handed me a large PDA that was the size of an iPad. He said that this was to be Kiyoshimo's new augmentation for her birthday, so I inspected it.

Kiyoshimo's augmentation, according to Big, is a highly experimental augmentation that's still in its prototype stages. Apparently, this was an augmentation that they'd been working on ever since we sent Jenna (Kuubo-Hime) over to them - it's meant to be an augmentation so powerful that once it's fully developed, it should only be able to be used as an internal augmentation for a battleship or a carrier.

It's called the Yamato Cannon, because they'd been developing the augmentation with Yamato's battleship construct in mind. Specifically, it's the Yamato Cannon Type 0 to indicate its prototype stage. They need a test run first in order to fix bugs with the augmentation's coding and potential damage output, so they intentionally scaled back the data and resource usage of the Yamato Cannon down to an amount that a destroyer can handle. Big told me that it was crucial for Kiyoshimo to give me a feedback report on her performance with the Yamato Cannon, because with that feedback, they'd be able to progress with developing it fully and making it a fully functional augmentation option for the battleships.

So once Big and Lauren flew off in their Osprey with the new Abyssal specimens, I sent the fleet off on their simple recon mission over to Dog District. I told Kiyoshimo to try to test out her new augmentation if she could get the chance.

While they were away, I got to work with Houshou, Mamiya, and Irako making the birthday cakes and youkan. It was fun making youkan, because the women were experts at making them. I guess it's only natural for them. In fact, so fun was it making youkan that we ended up making all kinds of flavors of youkan. My favorite was the grape youkan - it tastes just like grape jelly, but because we didn't use any bullshit artificial sweeteners or synthetic sugars, the youkan tasted great and fresh. Even as an American, who's grown up on oversugary snacks and high fructose corn syrup injected into everything, I can appreciate a nice snack like youkan. I told Houshou, Mamiya, and Irako that they could make me fruit youkan if they couldn't think of something to give me as a snack, since they tend to stop by my office to give me sliced fruit, rice crackers, and tea, among other Japanese snacks.

Once the fleet came back with minimal damage (they skirmished against an Abyssal squadron off Alpha Three on their way back), Kiyoshimo immediately bounced into the kitchen, where I was finishing Kiyoshimo's chocolate pound cake, and before I could react, Kiyohimo, her combat gearbox still on her back and all, body-slammed me down to the floor, causing me to let go of the cream filler, which flew into the air and slapped against my face and squeezed cream into my eyes. Without bothering to wipe the cream off my eyes, I asked Kiyoshimo if she was happy with the augmentation that she'd received, but she was too busy burying her face into my chest. Hibiki came over and swiped some of the cream off my face and ate it nonchalantly, I could tell.

Let me tell you why Kiyoshimo was so damn happy...

The Yamato Cannon Type 0 is an augmentation that turns Kiyoshimo's 12.7cm guns into miniature particle accelerator cannons. The tablet itself, which is so large that we had to stick it on the back of Kiyoshimo's gearbox, is actually a miniaturized nuclear reactor that generates very small and controlled chain reactions that provide the energy necessary for Kiyoshimo's guns to fire the Cannon. The cooldown itself is thirty minutes between shots to allow the reactor to build up enough energy for another Yamato Cannon, and it can't be fired while moving because it'll screw up firing calculations. According to the other ship girls, it's really scary, it's fucking loud as hell, and according to Kiyoshimo, the recoil was so huge that it literally blew her backwards off her feet, but Kiyoshimo doesn't give a fuck - it's worth it.

The Yamato Cannon turns Kiyoshimo's ordinary 12.7cm guns into something along the lines of 51cm howitzers. When they reconned out Dog Two, Kiyoshimo asked Souryuu, the fleet flagship, if she could try out her new augmentation. Akagi confirmed through her recon planes that she saw something that looked like a radio comms tower fly about a kilometer away when the Cannon hit home.

This means that right now, for one shot every thirty minutes, Kiyoshimo is the single strongest ship girl in the fleet - and possibly in the battlefield. She, by herself, can outgun any single other ship girl in our fleet. Not even Yamato, with her 46cm main guns, can match Kiyoshimo's Yamato Cannon. With this new augmentation, Kiyoshimo didn't just achieve battleship-level potency - she surpassed it. She's now practically her own class, and she knows it.

So happy was Kiyoshimo, in fact, that she was in tears by the time I wiped the cream off my face. She said she didn't need the cake, because she didn't actually think that I would've taken her words seriously back then, when she first told me about her idealistic but probably unreasonable aspirations to become a battleship.

So instead, she gave me a big fat kiss, right on the lips.

In front of all the destroyers.

As soon as Kiyoshimo stopped, Akebono screamed "YOU FUCKING SHITTY ADMIRAAAAALLLLLLL" and tossed me out of the kitchen in to the mess hall like she was flipping a table like an angry nerd.

And then we all had delicious cake and youkan afterwards.

Japanese Internet jokes aside, we had our parties in the mess hall, since Shinsengumi was probably too small to contain the craziness that was about to ensue. I gave Hatsuharu her present that I picked up earlier today, which she greatly thanked me for, because she said she wanted to someday start collecting fans as a hobby and build up her own fan collection. Kiyoshimo, who got a bit too caught up in her hype of becoming an insanely powerful ship girl, tried to mow through her chocolate pound cake, forgetting that her stomach didn't quite match that of Yamato's, and Yahagi, Yamato and I had to convince Kiyoshimo to let the others have some cake to prevent Kiyoshimo from making herself throw up from overeating like a bulimic. And all the while, I had to suffer the stares of the destroyers who'd witnessed Kiyoshimo put a big fat fuckin' kiss on my lips.

Samidare especially. I had to explain the situation to her, but even still, she was, let's be honest, a bit jealous. I honestly don't know what else to do beyond that.

I sent Kiyoshimo's feedback report to Seal Team Six. Kiyoshimo, being the kind of girl she is, wrote a really short, concise report. Literally, all it said was things like "BIG RECOIL", "REALLY STRONG", "I HAVE TO WAIT TOO LONG BETWEEN SHOTS", and "CAN I KEEP THIS PLS". But I added more informative notes along with Kiyoshimo's report so that Big wouldn't be sitting in front of his computer scratching his head and wondering if his decision to entrust this prototype to us was a mistake.

But real talk, if Kiyoshimo can outgun even Yamato with a prototype augmentation like that, I don't even wanna know what Yamato'll be able to do when she gets her hands on a full-production one.