Saturday, April 12th, 2014.
Found Shigure, Samidare, Harusame, and Yuudachi on me in my bed this morning. I'm trying very hard not to the use the whole forgot to turn off my swag joke.
Because it's the weekend, but also because Operation Rising Sun is coming closer, I had the fleet train all morning and afternoon. I assigned the vets to teach the newcomers and train them thoroughly. The entire morning, they did the most basic drills - target practice, combat maneuvers, fleet maneuvers, fleet formations. You gotta get the basics down first solidly before moving on to anything else.
At lunch break, I sat with Kitakami and Ooi today, something I hadn't done ever since just before Ooi's death. More rather, they were the ones who came over to sit with me, because we were the first ones to get our food in the mess hall. I asked them how things were treating them lately, and they said everything was going fine. Kitakami remarked how popular I'd been getting lately with the fleet, how she was surprised that I was thinking about leaving when I was getting it on just fine with a lot of the girls. I had to correct Kitakami, saying that if I had a choice, I would definitely stay at least a little while longer. It was true; the girls were really getting to like me, and I was starting to like them, too.
Kitakami then said,
"Then what about the two of us? Me and Ooi...do you like us, too?"
I asked her in what way, as ship girls or just plain girls.
"Both."
Kitakami was referring to how before, in the immediate aftermath of Ooi's death, Kitakami and I really clashed and never really fully made up. Having Kitakami upgrade to Kai along with Ooi sort of alleviated that problem, but it more loosened the tension between us than it resolved that conflict. But now, after however many weeks it's been since then and a lot of things and changes had happened, I didn't really feel that same animosity towards Kitakami anymore. I no longer think she's just a straight up bitch, and to be frank that was just plain rude of me to think that way anyway. I did admit that before that I was still feeling very salty towards Kitakami, though. But still, then was then, now is now. I told Kitakami that whatever grudge I had against her for coming off as disagreeable to me no longer remained relevant, and that I liked her and Ooi just as much as everyone else. It was at this point that Kiso, Tama, and Kuma, their ship sisters, came along and sat with us to eat lunch, since they saw us talking together, which is a rare sight in and of itself.
I told Kitakami and Ooi, and now Kiso, now that she joined us, that I was really glad that I put them through the Kai upgrade program. Their new skills and abilities always play a huge part in the success of the missions, especially during the beginning, before all the destroyers got their torpedo launchers. When Ooi and Kitakami were among the first Kai ship girls in the fleet, they were oftentimes the only reason why I could send the fleet on sorties that otherwise I would have shied away from or refrained from sending the fleet on.
None of the three torpedo cruisers were prepared for such a small but genuine speech from me. I guess Kitakami was most affected by it, since she and I had a historically bad relationship, so I'd imagine that she was feeling like she was getting super guilt-tripped and everything. I asked Kitakami if she'd gotten over whatever animosity she had felt before towards me.
Kitakami said that she didn't know. Time certainly had mended our relationship somewhat simply through the absence of heavy interaction between us. Plus, Kitakami admitted that she'd taken her internal augmentation, the powerful Weapon Pre-Igniter, for granted after a while, and that my little talk about how I was grateful for her "skills" had painfully reminded her that had I not given the go-ahead to have her upgraded to Kai in the first place, she would've never achieved the level of power that she has now, including the title of "Super Kitakami-sama" that she totes about quite amusingly but truthfully. It wasn't so much "skill" than "ability" that Kitakami said she was using. It's not like she'd done anything specific to earn her insane power, it had been given to her, against all conventional reason, during a time when she and I, her Admiral, were having quite a bad quarrel in the wake of Kitakami's best friend and fellow ship sister.
"I sometimes wonder why you even decided to have me get Kai," Kitakami said to me, "and I never could come up with an answer for that. I wanna know why you gave me Kai, even though you didn't have to."
I just shrugged. I think that I used to know the answer to that, but I'd long since forgotten because I just didn't want to have to deal with Kitakami's bitching at the time, so my mind just subconsciously smothered whatever thoughts I had regarding the matter. If I wanted to make myself look like a saint, I would just say something like, "Because I had faith in you that you'd change for the better" or something, but I wasn't going to say that. Instead, I told Kitakami that if I knew myself correctly, I gave her the Kai upgrade because I wanted to make amends as quickly as possible so that we wouldn't have to fight anymore, not out of any sort of arbitrary altruism.
That, and honestly, even despite my animosity towards Kitakami from that time, I said that I probably felt some pity for Kitakami somewhere deep inside, because after all, she did lose Ooi, her best friend and fellow ship sister. I suppose giving her that Kai was my way of giving her some kind of consolation, even though it did come after Ooi came back as Kai herself.
Kitakami just giggled at me, like she was making fun of me, but I just shrugged it off.
"You're really weird, you know that?" she told me. I told her back that it wouldn't be the first time I was called that.
Kuma and Tama, because they were newcomers, asked me to elaborate on the background of our conversation, so I asked Kitakami if it was okay to tell them about our brief history together, which Kitakami consented to.
After lunch, I oversaw the fleet's tactical training, like attack formations, defensive formations, and what I've come to call "target combo" maneuvers, which are a sequence of shots from a specific lineup of ship girls chained together to disable or sink an enemy Abyssal. It's a term taken from the FGC. (Street Fighter, specifically.) The fleet's sortied so many times and gained enough knowledge and experience about the enemies that I now know exactly what the optimal target combos are against certain Abyssal enemies. For example, to take out an Abyssal heavy cruiser like the Ri-Class, the most efficient target combo is two of Wakaba's JDAM-converted homing torpedoes, Fubuki's 12.7cm volley, then Yuudachi's close-range 12.7cm volley. Things like that, I had the fleet train on, and by the end of it, I divided the the fleet as evenly as I could to make the two sides as equal of combat skill and power as possible and had them fight out eleven mock battles in a best of 21 while Mamiya, Houshou, Irako, and Error started getting the preparations for the outdoor barbeque ready, with extra portions of barbeque as the reward for the winning side. That got the fleet motivated, and the score came down to a narrow fight of 11-10, with Akagi's side clinching the victory, just barely in a final one-on-one between Akagi and Souryuu, the two opposing flagships. Quite the entertaining practice battles to watch.
Afterwards, I sent the fleet to the bathhouses to prepare for dinner, and the ladies and I started up the Southern-style pit fires again and started barbequing. Chika, Batsubyou, and Toyoda came out at the smell of roasting meat, wondering what we were doing outside, and Batsubyou seemed to recognize what we were doing, because he sat next to the hearth that I was working on for the warmth mixed with the relatively cool sea breeze coming in during the late afternoon. Chika joined him once she seemed to understand that it was safe for her to do so, and Toyoda kept sniffing hungrily at the cooking meat and kept batting at my side, begging me to let him eat some too. I'm a sucker for pets, so every time I cut up some meat to taste its progress, I would give a tiny bit to Toyoda too, just to let him know that I wasn't neglecting him. But not too much, since cooked meat for humans is tricky around pets.
And with that, since the fleet obviously didn't suffer anything like injuries or anything, they all came out from the bathhouses around the same time, just in time to see roast up the last few initial batches of Southern-style pork, ham, and chicken, marinated and spiced to perfection. True to their names, Kuma and Tama joined Toyoda in bothering me, constantly asking me "Is it done? Is it done? Is it done?" while drooling all over my pants. I warned the new ship girls to try not to eat too fast, otherwise they'd end up with upset stomachs the next day, as our last such barbeque had proven. And thus we had our second outdoor barbeque, filled with binge eating and drinking against my advice, song singing, story-telling, laughter, and shenanigans. Sometime during the middle of it, Aoba even got us all together and took a group photo, and we're going to print one out so that Aoba can make a frame for it and give it to me to put on my desk.
It's nice making memories.