Friday, April 11th, 2014.
Woke up to help Akashi with Harusame's reconstructive surgery, really early too, at that, which probably wasn't a good idea, seeing that I'm still recovering from a gunshot wound. Multiple ones, might I add.
However, I think that Harusame's taken quite a liking to me. What's with the Shiratsuyu-Class destroyers and liking me, anyway? Is there something that they share that naturally attracts them to me? After we reattached Harusame's arm, I spent some time massaging the muscles in her new arm to get it to warm up faster. Technically I don't need to, it would've been fine on its own, but according to Akashi, she's noticed that with all the reconstructive limb surgeries that she's done, freshly attached limbs get to work if massaged, since external stimulation will help the muscles of an arm that's never worked before and now suddenly is being told by someone's brain to move around and do things work how they normally should faster. So by doing this, I think I made Harusame...fall for me, or something. I don't know. I really don't wanna sound super friggin' lame or something, but after I was done, Harusame mentioned that she was starting to understand why her ship sisters liked me so much.
Just from an arm massage, though? Harusame said that she could feel that I was a truly kind person, taking of her like that. But I have to ask, just from an arm massage? This isn't a harem anime. But of course there was no way I could say that to her face.
In any case, Akashi, Harusame, and I went to go have breakfast with the rest of the fleet, and as soon as we entered, Suzuya tackled me to the ground back out the mess hall, sobbing something about not ever having a night battle together just yet and me leaving before then. That hurt, too, it reopened my gunshot wound, and Shigure came over and hurled Suzuya off me. Shigure, now that she's Kai 2, can just toss anyone around as she pleases. She and Hiei got into a trivial argument recently sometime yesterday or two days ago or something while they were having some Ramune bottles with their friends at Shinsengumi, and Hiei apparently said something mean about me, and Shigure took Hiei outside and just tossed her into the pier, no shits given. Hiei's been traumatized ever since, apparently, since she never wants to go anywhere near Shigure.
And during breakfast, because of our little emotional gathering last night from my little farewell speech, I noticed that the entire fleet all sat around me. Mostly the veterans, though. Samidare, who had cried her eyes out last night in my office when everyone piled in, still couldn't hold her feels properly and would occasionally sniffle or even wipe a tear from her eye as she sat next to me eating her breakfast.
The veteran heavy cruisers, battleships, and carriers, who hadn't had a chance to talk to me last night after my little speech (which they heard since the PA system also plays in the bathhouse), sat close to me at breakfast, most notably, which usually they don't out of respect for a superior officer. I just restated my thinking on how things were going to pan out for the next two weeks and why I believed that I wouldn't be around for much longer, now that the Japanese government was stepping up its efforts to ensure the end of the war against the Abyssals. I said that I didn't know what would happen to any of us, or the Moebius Four Platoon, after Operation Rising Sun, and that I could only use my own personal intuition and experience with military politics to predict what would happen. But the way I see it, I can't see it going any other way, to be honest.
Souryuu suggested that we all have a big barbeque like last time tomorrow on Saturday night, since that was some of the most fun the fleet had had so far in Okinawa. But I had an even better idea - I wanted to take the fleet on a weekend vacation somewhere local. Okinawa is famous for its beautiful tourist beaches, like Emerald Beach and Miyagijima. Since the ship girls can manually shut off their ship modes and just be regular human girls, going on a beach vacation wasn't totally out of the picture, and it was really the only practical vacation option I could think of. Luckily, the girls seemed pretty charmed by this, but I got this feeling that it was more the prospect of a vacation, which we've never really had before, that appealed to them more than the ocean. Makes sense, though, since we all see the ocean all the time anyway. After all, we are a navy.
Today's mission was to have the fleet sortie to Baker District and investigate Hoppo again. I made Shigure Kai 2 flagship for this mission, because she's the single strongest ship girl that we have at base now. I had all the Kai ship girls escort her with the fleet following close behind in a semi-defensive, semi-protective fleet formation as they go into Baker District. I ordered the fleet to analyze what kind of enemy Hoppo was so that we could relay more information to HQ and Seal Team Six so that we could figure out exactly what it is that makes Hoppo so strong.
While the fleet was away, I spent the entire time baking sweets for everyone, as Houshou had compelled me to do. Had the fleet not returned so soon, I would've pulled it off, too, but as it turned out, they didn't run into Hoppo today when they arrived at Baker District. A disturbing revelation, that Hoppo wasn't at Baker District when the fleet had seen her there and even fought her there for all this time until now. So sure was I that they would encounter Hoppo today that I hadn't given them any other objective to work off of, so Shigure decided that simply falling back to base for today was the right call after destroying the incubation fields again. They weren't even touched by any Abyssals going or coming back...perhaps the fleet just got really lucky in evading Abyssal patrols or something, because the ship girls' recon planes didn't see jack shit.
Since today was a Friday, we all went over to Shinsengumi to hang out and have a dinner of Hakata ramen, and Mamiya, Irako, and I brought over the various kinds of sweets that I'd baked while the fleet was away. When the girls started eating my sweets for dessert, Akagi suddenly burst into tears and ran over to squeeze my face into her chest, lamenting about how she'd miss my cooking and baking once I was removed of my post. The other veteran ship girls reacted pretty similarly, including all the starter ship girls, the five destroyers I'd moved into the base with and who'd been with me from the very beginning. It was at that point when Murakumo, the usually headstrong, proud, keeps-a-lid-over-her-emotions girl finally broke and started crying. The growing reality that I wouldn't be their Admiral for very much longer had only begun to hit Murakumo then, and when she broke, Murakumo shattered hard. I even had to go over there to console her for a bit, and her head arrays, which normally only flash one of two colors, those being green and red for normal and angry, were glowing a weak blue, which was a first. I mean, the first hour or so of our little Friday night party at Shinsengumi felt like some sorta high school graduation party or something.
I told them that they should be saving their tears for the day I had to leave the island. I didn't even know if my own predictions would be true or not, yet the fleet was already acting up like this. At least, the veterans who've been with me for a long time are, the newer ship girls not so much, understandably. I reminded them that there still was a chance that I would remain in my post even after Operation Rising Sun, just that it wasn't likely. I don't think they listened to me, though. Either they somehow know that they wouldn't have me as their commander for very much longer like they're all clairvoyants or something, or they're just overreacting. I think they're just overreacting. Like Ooyodo said, peel off everything that makes them a ship girl, and you've got yourself just a base full of ordinary girls who're just living out their lives just like any other ordinary girl their age or appearance would do in their own shoes.
So to distract them, Sazanami and I pulled out the video games, and we went ham. For some six or seven hours straight, we played all the video games, sang karaoke with Kirishima as our resident MC (mic check!), and watched through the feel train that is Clannad and Clannad Afterstory. I used this opportunity to open up a lot of the newer ship girls, especially the more outgoing ones like Kuma and Tama, who played through Starfox 64 on the N64, a classic game and one of my childhood favorites. They were trying to get to the upper worlds, like Aquas, Zoness, Sector Z, and the other ones. Due to my endless hours of practicing score runs on that game during boring middle school summers, not only did I show them the upper worlds, but I showed them just how high of a score you can get in that game by having an optimal score run. I was really rusty, so I restarted a couple times (more out of habit than frustration), but eventually I got a decent run (around 2000 hits, I think) that left Kuma and Tama (and some of the other ship girls who were familiar with Starfox 64) just absolutely stunned 'cause they didn't even know it was possible to get a score that high, especially some of the tricks you have to use to achieve score runs like that. Kumano and Nachi were really surprised and impressed by my baking skill when they ate the chocolate muffins with chocolate chips, so Taigei joined us while we talked about all sorts of baking stuff, techniques and methods and whatnot, I'm not familiar with all the cooking terms since I'm mostly self-taught. I also spoke a lot with Amagi, and I learned about the history behind the real life Amagi, how they were both originally designed as battleships, but because of the Kanto Earthquake in 1923, Amagi was damaged beyond repair and had to be scrapped, while the Washington Treaty forced Amagi to be converted into a carrier. In addition, there was another Amagi, an Unryuu-Class carrier, that shared the same name. Seal Team Six had paid such close attention to historical details that they decided to merge the two Amagis, the battleship that was aborted and the carrier that served during the war, into one, hence explaining why Amagi was a special ship girl with a hybridization of the two ship types. It also explains why Akagi seemed to have so much damn tankiness for a carrier from all the battles she's been in - although I'd have to prove this, with Amagi's words, I'm almost positive that Seal Team Six kept Akagi's battleship characteristics in there somewhere, like the battleships' tankiness.
So after chasing after Emily, Akitsushima's flying boat, that had nicked my hat and was flying around the base with it on its back wheel and recovering my hat, I went back to Shinsengumi to help clean up. Some of the newer girls, who weren't completely settled in yet and didn't conform to the rest of the veterans' tendency to just do whatever and go off to their dorms to do whatever and leave the cleaning to me and Houshou normally, were surprised to know that the Admiral did such menial labor like cleaning up. And after sending the girls off to bed, I sat in the izakaya alone for a bit with a bottle of orange Ramune.
Yamato then came in to talk with me. We didn't talk for very long, nor very much. But in the few words we did exchange, Yamato admitted that she'd been keeping her feelings for me a secret for a while and wanted to let me know that she really looked up to me, and that she and the rest of the fleet would really miss having me as their commander. She seemed a bit...how should I put it, ashamed? I thought about it for a little bit afterwards, just before sitting down to write this, but the only explanation I can think of is that Yamato, because she's supposed to be the pride of the Japanese Navy, she's supposed to be the representation of everything ideal about a Japanese woman - a Yamato nadeshiko, complete pun intended. So seeing that a Yamato nadeshiko kind of woman would typically - or should - look into marrying a fellow Japanese man, Yamato confessing her feelings for me would indeed be taboo in that sense, hence her shame in coming to me and admitting something like that. I had a sense of this when we were talking, so just in case my gut feeling was incorrect, I told Yamato that she and the rest of the girls would find another commander like me who would care for them as I'd tried - hopefully someone better, less stupid, and more platonic than I'd been. I myself admitted that while unintended, I wound up making deeper relationships with the girls than was militarily acceptable. After all, this was still a naval base, and having relationships like the ones I had with the destroyers shouldn't really be there to begin with. Sure, I wanted to get along with my fleet and my soldiers, but I think somewhere along the line, I screwed up and got too personal, too caught up with the personal business of the girls to justify the status of our relationships now. But that only just begs the question of whether or not I really should've gotten that involved, and that's another can of worms entirely.
In any case, I gave Yamato a hug. I didn't want to go around raising flags all over the place, but I told Yamato that I wished for all the ship girls created for the Moebius Four Platoon to continue to live on and find new purposes in their lives after the war that wasn't all about fighting and killing. Kiyoshimo would've wanted the same for us, too.
That caused Yamato to pull a Samidare and just stop giving a damn and cry like a little girl. I'm not saying that to be condescending, though. That's literally what happened.
As the conductor of this feels train, I should probably apply the brakes soon...I mean, look at all this collateral damage.