Tuesday, April 15th, 2014.
Couple things happened today.
I already mentioned how the girls sensed that I didn't like my parents, so at breakfast, the usual gang sat with me in an effort to try to figure out why I seemed to dislike my parents so. Still, I refused to tell them. Not because I didn't think it was worth my time telling them, but even talking about my parents would leave a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, as though any words about my parents was a bitter medicine I was forcing myself to drink every single time.
Harusame asked me why I showed such dislike towards my own parents. They were my family, right? She asked if I had any other siblings, to which I responded that I did not. So Harusame pointed out that this was all the more reason not to shun my own parents, because they were the only family I had. I should be showing them all the love and care that I had. In addition, not surprisingly, Naganami took this chance to poke a few bones at me by accusing me of hypocrisy, that while I was trying to convince her to get together with Hayashimo as ship sisters, I was meanwhile shunning my own parents. The other girls brought up similar arguments, trying to crack me to figure out why I didn't like my parents. Even then, though, I didn't tell them. Like I said yesterday, they'd find out for themselves why I didn't want my parents to come here.
Today was one of those rare days where I truly felt annoyed. My parents are one of the few sensitive buttons that I have, and it was now constantly getting pressed. I mean, I could've gone on without telling the fleet, but my parents arriving in Okinawa is kind of a big deal, whether I want it to be or not. I asked the fleet to drop the subject as calmly as I could, because I didn't want to resort to ordering them to shut the hell up. Most of them got the point, but Naganami kept being a bitch to me, which, for the time being, I dealt with.
I keep telling myself that I really ought to get along with Naganami. I've seen her when she's not around me - she's a nice girl, a tomboyish sort, outgoing and energetic. It's just whenever she has to interact with me or Hayashimo that she turns pissy. And when she does turn pissy, it fucking annoys the hell out of me. High school trauma much.
In preparation for my parents' military review this Thursday, I decreased today's morning training by an hour so that I could have the fleet rehearse a military review. I sent an email to HQ while the fleet was still training asking if we could get proper Navy uniforms for the fleet in preparation for my parents' military review, since - well, let's just say that the ship girls' uniforms are unconventional. I'm looking at uniform styles like the ones on Urakaze, Noshiro and Yahagi, Shouhou, etc...not really what you'd expect out of "military" uniforms. I told the girls that for the sake of the military review, I would have to revert back to my old training habits, and at the mention of this, the starter girls freaked out. Inazuma and Samidare both became really frightened and hugged each other for dear life, and Fubuki demanded to know why. I said it wouldn't be for long, only until the day of the military review, and things would go back to normal. The rest of the fleet obviously had no idea why the starter girls were freaking out like they were - they found out for themselves firsthand how I trained my troops in the Navy. I warned them, too, that I was going to have to become a totally different person than what they were used to for the sake of getting a military review rehearsal right in just two days, and that some of them would have different opinions of me afterwards.
So for the first time in about three months, I drilled the fleet personally to have them practice an American-style military platoon review. Thankfully, the fleet quickly got used to my drilling style, which I toned down quite a few notches than what I'd usually use for my normal sailors and soldiers. Obviously the more frisky or uncooperative girls like Naganami and Urakaze and Hayashimo had some problems following orders, but for the most part, the drilling went smoothly. I think it's because the fleet understood that I was doing this for my parents, not for their own personal training. After all, drilling like this doesn't really help them fight out at sea in any way.
During lunch, I saw Kitakami give Abukuma a light chop to the head, something that I thought wasn't a big deal, but then Abukuma reacted really violently at it and yelled at Kitakami to piss off, or something along those lines. Normally Abukuma's a good, obedient girl, but she really got ticked off by something that looked harmless. I asked Abukuma what was wrong after lunch, while the fleet was gearing up for the sortie today, and Abukuma explained to me how Kitakami was always doing little things like that to annoy her. I asked her if she knew why Kitakami was doing those things, and Abukuma theorized that it was probably because she'd rammed into Kitakami before as warships and ended up losing her bow in the process, and that Kitakami was probably doing these things to rub it in. Abukuma said that she didn't like it, and that she felt like Kitakami was bullying her for no real reason, especially when something like that was so far gone in the past and it wasn't like Kitakami was the one who was the more damaged from that incident. I asked Abukuma if she wanted me to go talk to Kitakami for her and tell her to stop, but Abukuma said she didn't want me to, because she was afraid that Kitakami would just end up bullying her harder because she'd think that Abukuma was the one who came to me to ask Kitakami to stop. Typical bully victim mentality, so I told Abukuma firmly that I would ask Kitakami to stop, and that Abukuma wasn't the one who told me, but simply out of my own observations.
Today's mission was to search for and destroy heavy Abyssal ships - battleships, carriers, and the capital ship girls. The fleet had lost a lot of augmentations that were critical for the fleet's survivability and battle potency, so I couldn't afford to send them on a dangerous mission like yesterday's Reverse Tokyo Express. However, Imuya and Goya still have their Lockdown Converters, meaning that isolating capital ships and sinking them was a viable option. I also gave the fleet a secondary objective of possibly bringing one or two of them back to base as prisoners if they could.
I didn't mention this yesterday, but Houshou proved why she's called the mother of the Japanese carriers. In yesterday's post-action mission report, Houshou did not miss a single shot from her dive bombers and maintained a perfect accuracy record. While she didn't do anywhere near as much damage as the other carriers because of her limited plane capacity, I was still really impressed. But what concerns me even more is the fact that Houshou revealed to me that she's possessed an internal augmentation of her own all this time, an upgraded variant of the Long Range Scanners that allows her to not only increase her recon plane scanning range tenfold, but also allows her to give exact coordinates of everything she sees to every single member of the fleet.
The fact that Houshou has had her internal augmentation for all this time since she arrived is extremely concerning, because it has a few really strange and eerie implications that it carries. For one, Houshou never left this base, so there was no way for her to receive any surgeries or upgrades without my knowledge, which can only mean that she was given her internal augmentation before she was deployed to Okinawa. So that begs the question of who exactly gave her the Long Range Scanners Mk. II augmentation, and when. Seeing that she has an upgraded variant of an augmentation we already have, the logical answer would be Seal Team Six. But that leads into the next concern, which is how it's even possible for Houshou to have had an augmentation that's more upgraded than the first one of its kind that we officially received. Plus, I didn't even know that the Long Range Scanners Mk. II was even produced at all. Did Seal Team Six already get to work producing augmentations well before we knew about their existence? Or was Houshou upgraded by a separate research group that independently developed augmentation technology on their own or received the blueprints for them from Seal Team Six? Houshou didn't know when or where she'd gotten them; she said that she's always had it on her. And lastly, how's it possible for Houshou to have an internal augmentation without even being Kai? All of the internal augmentations that the fleet possesses are stored inside the brains of the ship girls who've received Kai upgrades because only with Kai can the girls handle the processing power that the internal augmentations require to operate properly. That being said, I do realize that it's never been specified that internal augmentations are only restricted to Kai girls, and that there may be some internal augmentations that don't necessarily require Kai upgrades to work. It's just that this's something that hasn't had a precedence.
I'm starting to feel like Detective Conan up in this bitch - except, y'know, without the detective smarts.
Regardless, I sent the fleet out. I sent another email asking about Houshou's mysterious origins of her internal augmentation to Seal Team Six, but they didn't get back to me so far today. Maybe tomorrow.
Aaaaaand to my great surprise, the fleet came back with both Re-Class and Ta-Class battleships.
The fleet had run into them and a large Abyssal patrol just three klicks off the shores of Charlie District and engaged them immediately. Imuya and Goya spammed their Lockdown torpedoes and managed to hit both Re-Class and Ta-Class, along with a few others, and Imuya chain-locked them for long enough for the fleet to beat the rest of the Abyssal patrol force back and capture the two. As usual, I told them what was going to happen to them as Abyssal prisoners of war here. Both Ta-Class and Re-Class, because they were Locked down from the first stages of the battle, weren't really damaged at all, but I told the fleet to take them to the baths anyway. Sent another email to Seal Team Six regarding the capture of our new Abyssal prisoners - they're sure to reply to that, especially now that we captured battleships like Re-Class.
Re-Class is certainly as strange as the fleet's reported her to be in all the times they'd fought - after they got out of the docks, Re-Class joined me in Shinsengumi for some onigiri. I tried to hold a conversation with her in English, but her fucking mind is all over the place. She's literally like a kid with legitimate ADHD, unable to focus on one subject for much longer than about forty seconds. I asked Ta-Class if Re-Class was always like this, and Ta-Class confirmed it for me, saying that even the Abyssals themselves had a lot of trouble dealing with Re-Class and telling her what to do and stuff. Re-Class also found our pets to be just adorable, though the cats stayed clear away from her because of her scary-looking tail that they didn't understand or like. Toyoda, however, didn't seem to care, and he pranced around with Re-Class and they danced around Shinsengumi.
To think that Re-Class was the one who killed Imuya the first time around a long time ago...on land, at least, Re doesn't seem to be that kind of girl. But then again, Re is probably just like Shigure and Yuudachi, keeping her violent, fiendish side of her reserved to times when she's told to kill.