Friday, April 18th, 2014.

The reason why I ended the journal entry yesterday so abruptly to the point where it probably sounded like I dropped the mic on my own fleet and dipped was because that's more or less what happened. Literally nobody talked to me for the rest of the day, which was fine by me since I spent the rest of the day locked away in my office. Well, I didn't actually lock the door, so it wasn't like I didn't want to talk to anybody, but it kinda felt like I did.

But today was the exact opposite. For starters, I woke up with a mountain of ship girls on me. I thought the days when Samidare and her sisters dogpiled me in the morning were bad, but not quite as bad as this morning. All five of the starters, Yuudachi, Shigure, Ikazuchi, Akatsuki, Hibiki, Harusame, Akitsushima, Suzuya, Imuya, Shioi, Kuma, Tama, and Taigei were in my room when I woke up, most of them in various sleeping positions. My body had been partitioned - divided and conquered - so that each part of my body was occupied by a ship girl when I realized why my body felt so heavy. I mean, waking up with Samidare's forehead touching mine from the side was bad enough. And normally, just shaking the girls off would be enough make them let go of whatever body part of mine they'd been hugging onto during the night like I'm some sort of ocean buoy, but this time none of the girls who were latched onto me wanted to let go, so I had to yell at them to get the hell off my bed. I asked them what sort of unholy ritual this was that they put me through during the night, and Taigei put it best when she said,

"Um...well...we felt bad because of what you must have gone through with...with parents like that..."

What happened was that yesterday, after I'd dropped the mic on them, the fleet felt really guilty about the whole incident yesterday with my parents' military visit. Of course they felt angry towards my parents when I translated my dad's message to them, but surprisingly, Naganami was the one who pointed out that if the fleet thought they were bad, they ought to consider what I must've had to deal with growing up with parents like that. The fleet's general perception of family and parents, how having family was always nice and dandy and having parents was the best thing you could have in life other than having children, was brutally shattered yesterday, and on top of all that, I'd warned the fleet about my parents. I'd made it clear to them that I disagreed with their visit from the beginning and didn't want the fleet to meet them. Although there is some fault of mine to be said in that I should've told the fleet exactly why I didn't want my parents to come and why they weren't exactly the best parents one could have, I think that telling them everything beforehand would've driven their disbelief in further and made the disillusionment even worse, if that makes sense.

Kuma asked me to tell them what it was like growing up. She said that they wanted to know more about my past, and the way she worded it made it sound like it was their frickin' duty or something to know. That, and Akitsushima kindly reminded me that it was only fair that I tell them more about myself when I, as their Admiral, knew everything about their histories or could search it up at any time. I felt like I wasn't gonna get out of my room to eat breakfast for the day if I didn't tell them, so I relented. It took an hour, and we ended up skipping breakfast, but I told them about what I remember from my childhood and whatnot. It wasn't like a sappy, depressing story that I told, and I told the girls that it wasn't anywhere near as dramatic as they might've thought it was. But I did specifically mention how my parents, even when I was a toddler, raised me up all military style. Things that normal parents, not even the stereotypical tiger parents, would do to their kids when they're toddlers, my parents did. Saluting, greeting my parents whenever I bumped into them at home, eating, everything was procedural. From the start, my parents manufactured me to become a son of liberty, if I make a terrible joke that's so not totally full of bitter irony, and guess what? They got what they wanted.

I didn't dwell on the feels too long. Even though I'll readily admit that I've always wanted to tell people who cared my life story, now that I've told it, I feel like a pathetic loser trying to seek guidance counseling or something. I suppose some things are meant to be carried with me to the motherfucking grave. I told the fleet not to worry about it, because with the position that I have now as the commander of a top-secret military black ops project, I held a higher status than either of my parents that exceeded any sort of maternal or paternal control over my post. They weren't going to interfere with me or the fleet or anything involving us. And even if they managed to, I have the military power to do something about it.

But of course I wasn't going to leave my room for free. Suzuya, after I finished, walked right up to me and smooched me right on the kisser, setting off a chain reaction of jealous ship girls (you can probably imagine who they were) who also demanded that I share the same treatment, even though I wasn't the one who started it. I myself demanded an explanation from Suzuya, who simply said that all the fawning she'd done over me had finally been justified, and that she wouldn't let any of the destroyers take me away from her. She said that she'd be the one who would spoil me the most to make up for whatever my parents didn't provide. You can also imagine what kind of reaction the rest of the girls had towards that. This was best exemplified by Samidare clutching my arm and putting herself in between me and Suzuya, glaring at the heavy cruiser like she's some kind of thief.

I got the creeping sense that I'd won the fleet's approval again essentially by using an incident to tell my fleet, "Look, this's how bad my life was, feel bad for me". I can't help but shake off the sense that I'd basically guilt-tripped the whole fleet into seeing me in a more positive light. I suppose you could say that for all the times I've been injured here at base, but at least those times I was trying to accomplish something. This time around, it wasn't I who accomplished something for myself, it was my parents who did it for me - something I wish they didn't do. But I suppose there's nothing I can do about it now - it would've been nice if I earned my own reputation, though. That's all I wanna say.

At breakfast, too, the newer ship girls, also swayed by their encounter with my parents, expressed their regret and apologies over yesterday's incident as though it was somehow their fault that my parents had made their visit here. Houshou, too, cooked me the most luxurious breakfast I'd had at base ever, a supremely hearty American-style breakfast of sausage links, buttered toast, chocolate chip pancakes (which I will admit that I absolutely love) and maple syrup, hashbrowns, tater tots, honey-glazed ham, and bacon strips and bacon strip and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strip and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strip and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strip and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and bacon strips and...

It was too much for me to eat, and I've been able to eat whatever amount of food that was made for me, so I had to share it with everyone. I gave Naganami a few choco-chip pancakes, in appreciation for her being considerate for my sake yesterday, and she asked me when I'd heard about her defending me and all, so I explained what happened in the morning. Naganami said that she didn't feel obliged to grow a relationship with me or anything like that, so bribing her with pancakes wasn't going to work. So I simply shoved a piece of choco-chip pancake into her mouth like I put cake in Murakumo's mouth however many months ago, and after tasting it, Naganami snatched the pancakes away from me and ran away. I'd much rather deal with a tsundere Naganami than a disobedient one, I suppose.

Got an email from HQ today informing me about several JMSDF practicing combat maneuvers in preparation for Operation Rising Sun, so I was to keep the fleet at base for today and this weekend. In addition, next Monday, we're going to go on practice combat runs with the JMSDF fleet. In addition, Seal Team Six notified me about their arrival this evening, that I should expect Losira to arrive in the evening and that I should prepare the girls I've selected for the Kai upgrades accordingly.

So I spent the rest of the day haggling out with the fleet who should receive Kai upgrades. Souryuu, Shouhou, and Takao were the obvious Kai candidates, so first I brought the battleships together to hammer out an agreement. I still wanted to vouch for Yamato Kai, but Kirishima was adamantly against this, saying that it was more effective to have either herself or Hiei get Kai'd. She even said that Amagi Kai was better than Yamato Kai, because at least with Amagi, both her battleship and carrier powers would be upgraded simultaneously. Yamato was already leagues ahead of all the other battleships, so having her receive Kai was just going to be overkill. Yamato had already made prior statements about how she didn't need or much less deserve Kai, that the amount of power I'd given her through augmentations was more than enough to make herself one of the most powerful ship girls at sea, so I could tell she was touched by my constant pushes to convince Kirishima to accept Yamato's Kai. Part of my own reasoning was that Kiyoshimo's memory was still very much so alive in my conscience, and I wanted Kiyoshimo's contributions to her Yamato Cannon to go the full distance with Yamato's Kai upgrade. But eventually Kirishima won out, since she did adequately prove through immense calculations that her arguments were more correct than mine that were based on mere emotion and feeling, and I decided to give the Kai to Kirishima as a kind of reward, in a sense, I guess.

Then came the real brunt of the haggling as I brought the rest of the fleet together to decide who'd get the last Kai and who'd get the two Kai 2 upgrades. If my debates with Kirishima before this was brutal, this alone took about four hours until dinner. It got to the point where the fleet was divided into factions, categorized by ship type, and within those factions were sub-factions that supported individual ship girls as candidates. It's like our mess hall suddenly turned into an American political party convention or something. And because I didn't want to have to deal with political bullshit all over again, I put my foot down and simplified things by ordering the fleet to calculate who the ship girls were whose upgrades would prove to be the most cost-effective, or the girls whose upgrades would strengthen them the most out of the rest of the fleet, for each of the ship types. They turned out to be a tie between Murakumo and Fubuki, Shioi, Yahagi, Atago, Amagi, Houshou, and Hiryuu. (Taihou was pretty pissed at this.) And for the Kai 2's, it was literally a four-way tie among Kitakami, Ooi, Yuudachi, and Suzuya.

With the fleet unable to come to a decisive consensus on their own, I intervened and selected them myself: Murakumo would receive the last Kai upgrade slot, and Yuudachi and Kitakami would receive the Kai 2's. Suzuya and Kumano tried their very best to convince me otherwise - Suzuya went so far as to offer both herself and her ship sister as "practice partners" in some "night battles". L-Lewd, eh? But I shrugged them off and cemented my decisions, emailing Seal Team Six about my selections so they can prep up for them.

As I was working in my office after deciding the Kai upgrade candidates, Houshou came to see me, giving me quite a platter of Japanese snacks and American snacks and lots and lots of tea. I asked her why she was spoiling me today, and Houshou stated that she'd always been spoiling the carriers, as she was the carriers' mother figure. But after seeing me yesterday, Houshou understood that I genuinely disliked my parents for reasons that were clear as day to the fleet and pitied me because of them. She professed that she couldn't understand why she could be treating the carriers like her own daughters when meanwhile, I locked away in my office haunted by whatever bad memories I had of my own parents. Just for today, she said, she'd treat me like I were her own son. She'd always wanted to know what it was like to have a son, after all.

So I played along and called her "Okaa-san" - Mother. Houshou gave me a hug for that. I suppose even someone like Houshou can have their moments. And I suppose, for my own sake, having a surrogate mother isn't so bad. It would honestly be quite lovely to have someone like Houshou to come home to and call Mom.

At 2200 hours at night, Losira came alone - again - in her Osprey. We loaded up the candidates for the Kai upgrades and Re-Class and Ta-Class, and Losira dropped us off another suitcase full of augmentations to replace the ones that were destroyed last time around. She said they should be back next Monday, in time for the naval practices with the JMSDF fleet.

We spent the rest of Friday night in Shinsengumi binging on Ramune, Hakata ramen, and video games. Just preparing for the end, making as many memories as I can of this place and of this fleet before it's time to say goodbye.