Wednesday, April 16th, 2014.
I got rudely woken up today by an overenthusiastic Re-Class who dragged me outta bed and over to breakfast with her tail that grabbed me by my foot. One hell of an alarm clock. Not to mention, the girls there got to see me shirtless in my underwear. No big deal, though. There have been and will more more embarrassing moments in my life.
At breakfast, the girls brought up the topic of the Kai upgrades this weekend again. They begged to know who I had in mind to upgrade to Kai. For starters, I told them that since I was looking for a heavy cruiser, battleship, light carrier, and carrier, it was probably a guarantee that Yamato, Akagi, and Shouhou would receive Kai upgrades. The heavy cruiser in question was still in contention, and the other upgrade spots were still up in the air. Kirishima was very resentful of this when I said it, I could tell. Hiei didn't seem to care - I guess it's because she's a bro. Souryuu immediately protested my decision to go with Akagi as Kai on the basis that she was the fleet's first carrier to be deployed to Okinawa and thus deserved a Kai spot first. I asked Akagi of her take on the situation, and she said she didn't care. Then again, she was more concerned with her food at the moment, so I don't know if her opinion's still valid, so I changed my mind to send Souryuu in first for Kai. Souryuu asked me what made me decide on upgrading Akagi first, and I explained that Akagi was consistently outperforming Souryuu in terms of battle performance. Sure, she might consume more resources, but she got more done. Souryuu countered that I should've thought about upgrading her first so that she could match Akagi's battle performance as well, not make Akagi who's already the heaviest hitter out of the carriers even stronger. So I relented and promised that Souryuu would be our first Kai carrier.
That thus opened up many more arguments from the rest of the fleet regarding the Kai upgrades. Kirishima protested that she was in the same position as Souryuu, that she had been serving the fleet for longer than Yamato had. She accused me of favoritism, that I ought to base the merit for those eligible for the Kai upgrades on hard work and dedication to the fleet rather than on strictly performance, math, and statistics. Very strange, coming from someone like Kirishima. But in this case, I said that it wasn't favoritism that led me to decide on sending Yamato in for an upgrade; Yamato just genuinely was the perfect choice for a Kai upgrade. Even without her Yamato Cannon, Yamato is the uncontested strongest battleship we have by a large margin, so upgrading her would be the most cost efficient. I told Kirishima that while I wanted to reward hard work and dedication, in this particular case there was no way I could ignore the potential of having Yamato turn into Kai. The math was too great; even Kirishima should be able to notice that. I did mention, though, that I could send in Kirishima as the last Kai spot, but that would piss off the destroyers and light cruisers vying for that last Kai spot, which they certainly were when I brought it up.
The starter ship girls who hadn't been upgraded yet also threw up a fuss, especially Murakumo and, not surprisingly, Sazanami. They were quite vocal in their demands to have at least one of them get Kai. Murakumo argued basically all of the same things that Kirishima had talked about, adding on that they were the very first ones to join the fleet with me; in fact, they didn't join the fleet, they'd made it. Which is very true, I will say. Sazanami also argued that it was totally unfair for me to upgrade a lot of the destroyers who simply asked for Kai upgrades. If they'd known about it sooner, she and everyone else who wanted upgrades would've all come straight to me and asked.
And then Urakaze came in, announcing that her launch day was this Saturday, so the perfect launch day present for her would be a Kai upgrade. She said that she'd talked with the veteran destroyers and found out that Wakaba received a Kai upgrade for her own launch day, so it would only be fitting if she followed suit, too. But Urakaze got shut down immediately by the other new ship girls like Taihou and Naganami who argued that their own launch days had already passed before they were deployed here to Okinawa, so it wouldn't be fair towards them. Taihou also pointed out that Akagi's launch day, too, was coming up soon on April 22nd, something that I didn't even realize until Taihou brought it up, and that I was considerate enough to allow Souryuu to receive Kai first over Akagi, despite Akagi's imminent launch day.
Sendai was really the only non-upgraded light cruiser who really pressed for an upgrade of her own. However, Ooi did demand me to send in Kitakami as one of the two open slots for Kai 2. Suzuya, too, jumped in on the Kai 2 hype train, demanding to be sent and claiming that nobody else was as qualified to receive a Kai 2 upgrade as she. She's got a point, too, it's not like she's just throwing out random claims: Suzuya Kai has the highest output on record for the average mount of non-torpedo-based damage inflicted per sortie, thanks to her heavy cruiser status and firepower and her Heavy Repeater augmentation. But Atago reprimanded Suzuya for being greedy, saying that it was better to spread the damage about so that the fleet wouldn't have to rely on a single girl for a reliable source of heavy cruiser firepower. She said that I ought to send Takao in for a Kai upgrade at least, since Takao, too, has been the fleet's first heavy cruiser.
So that's how we spent the morning breakfast hour, arguing about who was most qualified to receive Kai upgrades and whatnot. It would just be better to simply upgrade everyone so that no one can complain, but obviously I'm not in control of the upgrades or resources to do said upgrades here. I said I would coordinate with Seal Team Six and come to a conclusion soon about who I'd send in.
Like yesterday, after the fleet's training, I had the fleet drill and rehearse the naval review for tomorrow. HQ never got back to me about sending any official JMSDF uniforms for the girls, so I can only assume that we're not getting them.
Doing the rehearsal itself pissed me off. The fact that my parents were going to just come visit without even sending a personal note themselves pissed me off. Just knowing that they would come just pisses me off in general. I let myself pour my anger into drilling the fleet - something that shouldn't happen, and something that the fleet was bound to notice, and they did. Urakaze, during the rehearsal, commented that she could understand my change in behavior yesterday, but today I was just straight up "being a hardass". Normally, if I heard a regular soldier in the Navy say something like that back to me, I'd order him to leave the decks and have no dinner for a week straight for insubordination, and such was my instinct - until I realized that there was truth behind her words. So I simply told Urakaze to quiet down and continue following rehearsal procedure.
Re-Class and Ta-Class watched us rehearse, and after we were done, they asked me what we were doing. I explained to them that my parents, who were important people in the country that I'm from, were coming to visit, and we were preparing for a military review to welcome them in traditional military fashion. Re-Class thought it was awesome seeing me to hard in the paint like I did - then again, Re is a fuckin' weirdo. Ta-Class didn't like it - she said that it reminded her too much of their own Admiral back home in Sector B. That prompted me to ask what their Admiral was like. Ta-Class said no one really knew much about him, but whenever he showed up, he'd always boss them around and treat them like shit. Huh, cliched bad buy archetype, huh? I must be the cliched good guy archetype, then, this's just fuckin' perfect. She did say that whenever he was around, he'd go around wearing a cowboy hat and always grumbled about things like not being able to destroy the world earlier with nukes and why his plans weren't being put into place faster and how the Abyssals weren't exactly the ideal minions he was hoping for to carry out his plans. But that's practically all she knew about him.
For today's sortie, I sent the fleet out to Easy District to interrupt supply lines once again. Perhaps if we capture resources from the Abyssals, we'll be able to send more ship girls in for upgrades, and the fleet immediately agreed, since they were on the Kai upgrade hype train. In light of the destruction of many of their augmentations from recent battles, I told them to immediately disengage from combat if there were too many heavy Abyssal ships on radar. The fleet's at the point where they can deal with an infinite number of Abyssal destroyers, light cruisers, and submarines, but once the heavy cruisers, battleships, carriers, and capital Abyssals start joining the party, that's when things get dicey. I reminded them to prioritize their own safety over the resources they were going to steal from the enemy - we couldn't afford to lose anyone just a week before Operation Rising Sun. However, because Re-Class and Ta-Class were lounging around, I worded my words carefully so that I wouldn't give away the fact that we had a final battle scheme in the works, and the fleet understood anyway.
While the fleet was sortieing, Ta-Class asked me what happened to the other Abyssals we'd captured before. They'd noticed that the fleet sometimes took their kind prisoner, but they could never tell if the fleet was going to come specifically to capture them or when. Some days it seemed like the fleet was strictly on orders not to kill but to capture, and other days it seemed like the fleet was just on a-move command. I said that it was more random than anything; sometimes we captured them on orders from our higher-ups, sometimes the fleet captured them out of their own whims. I had to speak cleverly to mask the true intents behind our captures of Abyssal specimens. I did tell Ta-Class that every time we captured Abyssals, a research team that was friendly to us would send over a transport plane to take them to one of their laboratories for study, and that this was the fate that all our prisoners had had so far, and that she and Re-Class would share that same fate too. I assured Ta-Class that it wasn't going to end up in their deaths; all the prisoners we'd sent over were still alive and doing well. Ta-Class didn't seem to believe me, but that's to be understood.
The fleet came back at around 2200 hours with a huge haul of Abyssal resources. It'd taken them twice as long as usual to return to base because everyone was so keen on being able to bring back as many resources as they could carry. The fleet had scored big when Akagi's recon planes spotted a huge convoy of Abyssal transport ships lugging along a fresh haul from Easy District bound for Dog District, heavily guarded by lots of Abyssal escort forces, but only a few heavier Abyssal ships, so Akebono and Suzuya moved in to take out the few Abyssal battleships that were there, leaving the rest of the fleet free to move in and eliminate all the lighter Abyssal escort forces while the carriers and battleships shelled the Abyssal carriers that were there from afar. They then had to secure the area as Abyssal forces nearby along the supply lines responded to their comrades' distress calls and tried to stop the fleet, but the submarines, with Taigei carrying extra loads of torpedoes to supply them mid-fight, thinned out their numbers by a whole lot by throwing torpedoes everywhere and returning to Taigei to resupply. Even Emily had flown back into base with a crate of resources tied to it. Kiso's post-action mission report also noted that Naganami and Hayashimo had fought together for most of the battle, and despite their bad relationship, they had fought well together. An improvement, at least. But with the amount of recovered resources that were brought back, I'm pretty sure we can afford one or two more Kai upgrades now. I'll have to get Seal Team Six to appraise the amount to verify.
In any case, I'm not looking forward to tomorrow. This fleet will see why I hate my parents so...