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Anonymous (ID: a8g4eB68) 09/14/22(Wed)13:24:26

Hey all,

I'm not used to the chans, but I've heard you guys love a good mystery, and sense the Media and the national parks service are being silent I think I should post this anonymously.

I work at Kalaloch Lodge, a hotel just North of Queets along the cost. We run a few cabins on the beach, where people have lodging conveniently close to several bridges and the rest of Olympic National Park. Of course, we lost a lot of business after Pearl Fell, but as we haven't seen a West Coast repeat of La Palma business has been steadily picking back up.

Anyways, this Monday, something really weird happened. In the afternoon, I heard a commotion, even though I was inside. Sounded like several thumps, as well as some kind of shrieking noise. Here's the video I took after rushing out: ( youtu. be/ EhqCC1tjSA6).

I think there's some kind of battle here, but I'm not sure. Any ideas, /k/?

Nashville leaned back, rereading the… webpage? Post? The cruiser wasn't entirely sure what to call the thing on Murray's laptop, but it couldn't be good. There was a lot more text after this, but judging by the formatting it had been written by other people. The Cruiser turned her attention away from the screen, focusing on the stoic spook standing behind her.

"Who wrote this?"

At the question, the Lieutenant solemnly shook his head.

"We don't know."

What? That didn't seem right.

"How don't you? This is a serious leak!" Everything was on the internet, right? What was the point of the Fleet Cyber Command if they couldn't track down some random civilian's webpage? "Can't we, like…" Her mind raced, grasping for an unfamiliar term "...triangulate where the page came from?"

"Computers don't work like that, Nash."

"Demand a list of everyone at the lodge, then!" Someone had seen their failure in the Battle off Kalaloch! This was a serious leak! A rouge abyssal was enough of a problem, but there was no way they could handle the information about her already bouncing around the internet.

"Not our job." The officer replied, reaching into his laptop bag and producing a file folder. "Hook that thing into the projector, will you?" He didn't wait for Nashville's response, instead dropping the folder onto the table. Its contents poured across its surface, a deluge of images, freeze frames, and written reports.

"We need to make something out of all this. If we can tell CINC-North where our Wo came from and what she wants, it's going to make finding her much easier."

"You'll be able to keep your commission, too." Nashville added, busy fumbling with a cable. How were these supposed to go together? There was only one cable sticking out of the conference table, so this must have been what Murray wanted to plug into his laptop, but where? "This cable hooks into the projector, right?"

No response.

The Cruiser looked up to find the Lieutenant still, his gaze focused on files in front of him.

"Shit, I said that out loud, didn't I?"

"Nashville," The analyst sighed, looking looking up from his documents. "That doesn't really matter. Not when there are so many lives at stake."

The cruiser pursed her lips, searching the man's face. He was technically correct, but the Cruiser had spent far too much time around sailors to know it wouldn't affect him. The shame for failing the Battle off Kalaloch still burned in her gut, and she couldn't imagine the human wouldn't be second-guessing himself as well. Still, if he didn't want to talk about it…

"Sorry," Nashville relented, returning her attention to the laptop. "That was out of line."

"Let's just focus on this, alright?" Murray replied, also returning to his duties.

By the time they spoke again, Nashville had figured out the projector, their laptop surrounded by an array of reports and images.

"So…" Nashville started, staring at the projection. "Is there a reason you asked me to project a random webpage?"

"The post doesn't have anything new, but I haven't seen the linked youtube video yet." He stood, bumping Nashville's shoulder as he clicked on the blue text. To the cruiser's surprise, the view suddenly changed, and she was suddenly watching a film of the gun battle. One of these days, she was going to have to sit down and figure out this tech stuff. "There could be useful information here."

On the wall of the conference room, a dark blotch sat on the horizon, the column of smoke trailing behind it barely visible against the overcast sky. Catching abyssals, or shipgirls like her, for that matter, on film was always a little tricky. According to a presentation she'd been forced to listen to during her recommissioning, a shipgirl in enough water to fit her hull existed in a dual state, simultaneously possessing the mass and profile of a humanoid and a steel hull. Shine a laser on her, illuminate her with RADAR, or point a camera at her, and you wouldn't know if you'd get the returns from a ship, a woman, or something completely incomprehensible.

Such a state felt natural to Nashville when she was on the water, but watching the dark blotch in the film flicker in and out like a dying lightbulb was bound to give her a headache.

"We're trying to figure out where she's from, right?" Nashville started, the echo of distant guns repeating in the room's speakers.

"Yeah." Murray replied, ignoring the video as someone near the camera started speaking. "I was hoping for a hull number or flag, but this camera isn't nearly as good."

"They have those?" Nashville replied, feeling a little better about being seen. No wonder the poster didn't know what she'd witnessed. This made the the spotty drone feed she'd used during the battle look like professional photography. Speaking of which…

"You know, didn't the drone feed show a big hole in her deck?"

"I think so." Murray paused, pausing the video and searching the table. "I think there's a good screenshot here, somewhere." In moments, he'd grabbed a frozen frame from the Drone footage, placing the image in front of the pair.

Even if the drone's feed had properly captured the enemy carrier, it wouldn't have been a good shot. Smoke curled away from her funnel, obscuring nearly half her hull. What was visible, however, wasn't particularly useful. The Abyssal's silhouette was further muddled, as a good portion of the ship's bow seemed to fade away. The ship also seemed to be surrounded by faint duplicates, partially-formed sensor ghosts Nashville didn't think anyone had explained yet.

"It's not terrible…" The spook mused, tracing the abyssal's hull with his pen. "We've got her flight deck here, with several AA positions visible below." The enemy ship was outlined now, a broad rectangle that trailed off in the smoke. "The island is here, while just to port…" His pen settled on the center of the carrier's hull. "This is what you noticed, right?"

"Yeah." Nashville nodded. "Looks like half her deck caved in." It was impossible to judge the extent of the damage because of the ship's smoke, but it what they could see of the Wo's dark deck was clearly warped, several broken and jutting planks visible even in the distorted image.

"That is some serious damage." Murray replied. "I'm not sure how it could happen, though. You're the ship, Nash. Can a deck just collapse like that?"

"Not on it's own." Nashville replied. "It has to be pretty reinforced if you want it to survive the stress of landing aircraft. Either we're looking at the first Abyssal invalid, or a patch job for a lot of damage gave out."

The cruiser let herself smile for the first time in days. At last, some good news. "She's going to need serious yard time before she's threatening any cities."

Murray nodded, but continued staring at the printout. Or, more accurately, through it. Something was going on behind that distant stare, and once again Nashville wasn't privy to it.

For once, that didn't bother her. What was he seeing? The Cruiser's attention drifted back to the image. Abyssals were strange by their nature, but if this image had him thinking so hard there must have been something particularly strange. The damage didn't seem like it was quite as bad as it had been on the Franklin, but that wasn't saying much.

"She's supposed to have another elevator here, right?" She guessed, pointing port to the Abyssal's amidships. Was this what had him so distracted?

"One of our Essexes would, but whoever's building the Alpha-Sierras likes to play around with their design." He traced his finger along the port side of the carrier's flight deck. "See how the deck's still standing along here? The Wo's hull where the elevator should be is solid enough that she probably didn't, err, come with one."

"Why handicap yourself like that? That's going to seriously hurt her launch and recovery cycle, right?"

Murray dismissed the question with a shrug, before turning to his laptop. In a moment, he'd minimised the video they'd been ignoring, instead diving into the laptop's more obscure settings.

"I'm connecting to NMCI." The spook added, guessing the cruiser's still-forming question. "ONI maintains a database of known abyssals, using intelligence gathered from submarines. There aren't many Wo-Class carriers with a long-hulled Essex's form, is missing her port elevator, who also participated in a recent fleet action."

As the Spook opened… some kind of program? An ensign had walked Nashville through this process when she'd first returned, but she'd immediately forgotten all of it. "That drone footage might have given us all the information we needed."

It almost seemed like the analyst was excited.

"That can't be reliable." The cruiser replied, remembering the wartime intelligence reports on the Yamato. 16-inches? My aft.

"For anything smaller than a Ne? Yeah." The Lieutenant admitted, "But the number of Wo's we've seen in the Pacific is only int the double digits. Of those, there can't be more than twenty of them with an Essex's hull, and sense she's a flagship, she's had plenty of time for one of our subs to find her."

It wasn't pretty, as far as webpages went, but its basic colors and simplistic style seemed to work well enough for Murray. The room fell into silence as the spook poured over entries, filtering a list of hundreds of hostile ships down to two or three.

"There." The spook finished, clicking on one of the three.

Wo-E6: "Caisson"

Nashville studied the projection, intending to check some of the older photos with the printout they'd been studying, but instead her gaze focused on the Abyssal's status.

"That can't be right." The cruiser exclaimed. "She's dead!"

"We thought she was" the Spook corrected, hovering his cursor over a date. "Sunk by an evolved sea sparrow during the battle of Bikini."

"That would explain her deck…" Nashville admitted. "...but didn't the Japs clear Bikini with surface ships?" She'd remembered her first battle after her return pretty well, after all. "You'd think it would be hard to miss an Aircraft Carrier."

The cruiser shouldn't have been surprised, though. How many times had they sworn Big E was on the bottom of the ocean?

"The ship, yes, but we know she'd be hard to spot if she crawled ashore."

Nashville grimaced. Yeah, that was understandable.

"Point taken." She didn't need a reminder she'd fucked up as well, but it seemed to be increasingly common. "So. She survives the battle. What's with the infiltration stuff? That's very different from…" Nashville scanned Wo-E6's service history. "...convoy escort."

"'Looking for someone,' huh?"

"What?" Nashville questioned, but Murray remained quiet. The abyssal had said that, hadn't she?

"Well." Lieutenant Murray replied, standing suddenly. "I think we figured out her motive."

"We did?" Nashville questioned. Sometimes she forgot why the Lieutenant annoyed her, but then he'd make her feel stupid again and it all made sense.

"Yeah." He nodded, "The abyssal was damaged, witnessed the Jellyfish princess turn back into Saratoga, and-"

"WHAT?"

Nashville felt like she'd been hit. The light cruiser remembered their battle with the Jellyfish princess well. The haunting transmissions they'd heard on their approach were nearly impossible to forget, especially as that creature's brand of nuclear nihilism was much better at getting under the cruiser's armor than Midway's impotent threats. To think that thing was the same as the sweet converted battlecruiser… Nashville had to have misheard him.

"She saw the Jellyfish Princess became Saratoga."

Oh, damn it!

The cruiser cradled her head in a hand, her mind racing as she leaned against the table.

"So we beat her up and she's suddenly on our side? Just like that?"

"Not… exactly, but I can give you the details later." Murray shrugged. "Isn't this an open secret among you shipgirls? We keep it quiet from the public, but there's no point in hiding it from you."

"If my sisters knew, they didn't tell me. I alway thought princesses were like- demons wearing ship's skins, or shadow clones, or-"

She stopped herself, a terrible thought dawning on her. Abyssals constantly talked about traumatic parts of their old lives. Two of the Brooklyns hadn't come back yet. Why wouldn't any of her sisters tell her about this?

"Brad."

"Hmm?" The intelligence officer's face hardened at the mention of his first name.

"Who owns the Falklands?"

Lieutenant Murray looked away from the Cruiser, sighing and sitting down. If Humans still held the island, it didn't disprove anything, but the alternative…

"Contact with the british garrison was lost a few days into the war." Murray started, pausing for a second to collect his thoughts. "It's been an Abyssal stronghold ever sense."

So that was it. The dream of getting all the Brooklyns together, of everyone in her class finally meeting for the first time, seemed to crumble like bread cast into a stormy sea.

"Now, there's no guarantee one of your sisters took the Falklands." Murray rationalized. "The Admiral Graf Spee hasn't returned yet, and there's plenty of Argentenian…" The officer's comforting words fell apart at Nashville's glare. There was no way he believed that.

Phoenix...

When the HMS Conqueror sunk her sister, she was heartbroken, of course, but the news had come with a bittersweet lining. At times, war between Argentina and her own nation, Chile, seemed inevitable. She was gone, yes, but Nashville no longer had to worry about facing her sister in battle.

Now? That possibility had returned like an unexpected torpedo, and it felt even worse. In the 80s, Nashville and her sister worked for different totalitarian regimes, and if a war started it would have been for traditional politics. Not pleasant, but the kind of thing Nashville was built for.

Now? She might have to put her sister down like a rabid dog. Not because of some political issue, but because she'd simply gone mad.

"I think we've earned a break." Murray stood again, making his way towards the door. "How do you like your coffee?"

The cruiser forced herself to focus on the question. They had a job to do, anyways? She could worry about her sister later. Still…

"With whiskey."

The Lieutenant nodded grimly. "I'll see what I can do."

So, this chapter's a little more technical than normal, especially as I tried to describe some stuff I've talked about in threads but never mentioned in-story. I hope there was enough good moments you found it entertaining.

Note, CINC-North should be named CINC-USNORTHCOM, but I'm unsure if anyone actually calls him that and it didn't seem natural to say.

Reading over my description of the picture of Trinitite, I'm not sure if I'm channeling Clancy or Lovecraft while writing. That doesn't feel like a good combo, and I hope the result was fun enough to read.

I also can't remember what Lieutenant Murray's first name is. I'm sure I wrote it down somewhere, but I can't find it. Therefore, his first name's Brad now. If I actually did mention it earlier (I looked, couldn't find anything), let me know so I can fix the inconsistency.

There's also supposed to be a youtube link in the 4chan post that points to an error page, but might remove it. It's not supossed to work anyways, so if it doesn't show up I probably won't correct that.