Rule 14144: We don't know who gave you the idea, but no shipgirl is allowed to use a carrier's flight deck as a surfboard. We don't care if they are their reserves, they are still valuable pieces of equipment and any damages to them will be coming out of your pay.

Rule 14144a: Using them as snowboards (or any other piece of sporting equipment) also falls under this rule.

Rule by Falkeno

At times, Admiral James Holloway wondered how he'd gotten so far without losing the few marbles he'd started with. Cunningham had tried to go down with his desk, somehow beating Colombo in the race to be the first one of them to go off the deep end, followed shortly after by his replacement, although nobody really counted him as they'd been trying to get rid of him on purpose. Privately everyone suspected that Briggs would be the next one to lose the plot, and there was a rumour that someone had a betting pool going, and with the man's recent examination at the happy farm, his odds weren't great. At this point the job should come with a health warning. But then they'd never find anyone to fill the posts, at least not without searching the world's loony bins.

The secret to staying sane in his job as the commander of the San Diego's Shipgirls was finding some pleasure in his job, and one of those few pleasures was his daily walks on the beach. Nothing kept the mental machinery free of proverbial monkey wrenches like a crisp sea breeze, the warm sand beneath his aching feet, the soft crash of waves breaking on the shore….

"WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU, I'LL RIP YOUR KEEL OUT WITH MY FUCKING HANDS!"

The dulcet tones of USS Midway screaming into the pacific ocean. This was going to be one of THOSE days.

"Midway, do I want to know, or is some sort of therapy I haven't heard of," Holloway asked rhetorically as he strode up the carrier in question, trying to use a tone that didn't sound sarcastic. Only to see from the glare Midway shot him that she was, as Collingwood would have put it 'having a sense of humour failure'.

"You really have no idea what's going on?!" The carrier growled.

"No, I have no idea what is going on, I was out having a walk when you started shouting at the ocean. Now will you please explain so I can either deal with it, or let it play out because I can't be bothered with the paperwork?" Holloway replied calmly. A calmness that evaporated as Midway opened her mouth to begin to explain the problem, only to find that she couldn't find the words she needed, and instead opted to shove a set of binoculars into the hands of the now thoroughly confused admiral.

"Just… just look, you'll figure it out for yourself," Midway explained, pointing out into the ocean, where Holloway could make out the smudge of a surfer, which the application of the binoculars revealed to be the cruiser USS Los Angeles dressed in a bikini that showed off her 'assets' that had he not been happily married, Holloway would have been fighting the urge to drool like a starving man at a complimentary all you could eat buffet.

"Ok, so it's Los Angeles surfing, and I don't see the…"

At that moment, Los Angeles lost her balance fell into the sea, which in turn caused her 'board' to rear up out of the water, revealing the unmistakable shape of Midway's original flight deck, the biggest give away being the massive number '41' painted on the front of it.

"You were saying sir?" Midway asked as Holloway mentally amended the odds on who was next to go bonkers.

"Alright… I'll get some of the coasties to sort her out, and all you are doing is…" Holloway was about to say that all Midway was going to do was fill out a complaint about the inappropriate use of a piece of her equipment, when the sound of excited voices caused the pair to spin on the spot. Just in time to be greeted by a horde of cruisers and destroyers charging down towards the water, each one carrying a carrier's flight deck of some description. "Stop that lot right now!" Yeah, this was really one of THOSE days!

=O=

USS Intrepid was not a happy carrier as she trudged through knee deep snow, following the trail of footprints that led up New York State's Whiteface Mountain. She was cold, tired and very, very annoyed.

She had just come back from helping with an Anti-submarine sweep off of the East Coast to two unpleasant developments. Firstly, her original flight deck had gone missing without a trace during the day it had taken to complete the mission. This in of itself had been concerning as whilst she still had the angled deck that she used for the submarine sweep, she preferred to run her original deck due in combat operation to its larger air wing and better AA suite, so for it to go missing hadn't been a pleasant experience.

An experience that had only gotten worse when she learned during her searching for her missing flight deck, that the shipgirls of San Diego had gotten the idea of using carrier flight decks as surfboards, until Holloway had banned it outright with an addition to the list, which should have made it a non-issue. Right up until someone realised the snowboarding enthusiast USS Denver had disappeared around the same time as her flight deck and had left a note saying that she was paying a visit to Whiteface mountain to 'ride some powder'. Naturally Intrepid had not approved of this plan, and so had been given permission by Wright to go and apprehend the cruiser in question, preferably before Admiral Briggs got wind of it and had to be coaxed out from under his desk, again.

"You'd think Denver would've thought twice about this stunt after what Midway did to Los Angeles," the destroyer minelayer USS Gwin DM-33 mused aloud as she trudged along behind Intrepid.

Ah yes, Los Angeles, to say she'd learnt her lesson would be an understatement, at least they assumed that after she'd been used as target practice for the entirety of the US West Coasts aircraft carrier force.

"Yeah, but you're forgetting that Denver is the biggest dumbass this side of the government, hell I'm surprised she's not a flat-earther!" Gwin's sister USS Shea replied. Compared to the rest of the US Navy's destroyers, who tended to be childish at best, and mad pranksters at worst, thank you Taffy 3. The Robert H. Smith-class were a surprisingly mature bunch of girls, no doubt as whilst they had been originally laid down as regular destroyers, they had all been converted into minelayers during construction, only to have ended up acted as minesweepers for their entire careers, a role that tended to promote maturity amongst shipgirls. Naturally this made them highly popular as escorts, and why Intrepid had taken two of them to help bring in Denver.

Intrepid could have added further evidence to Denver's lack of brains by pointing out that she hadn't even bothered to try this stunt on a proper ski route, having instead taken off uphill and right into the trees, which even a novice like Intrepid seemed to be a bad idea in the long run, but as she was trying to stop her teeth from chattering in the cold she elected to remain quiet. Even with her internal systems doing their best, backed up by a layer of winter clothing that's rustling was slowly driving her mad, Intrepid was freezing cold, a fitting reminder that she had been built for the slightly warmer climate of the Pacific ocean and not for the depths of this frozen hell, and this was coming from someone who had spent nearly 50 years in New York itself.

Fortunately up ahead the trees parted revealing the open space of a hilltop, and shortly after, the snowsuit clad form of Denver who it appeared, had just finished tying herself onto the top of Intrepid's flight deck and was just about to start her run down a narrow gap in the trees back towards the parking lot they'd all arrived in.

"Alright Denver, that's far enough, now give me back my flight deck before you make things worse!" Intrepid shouted, both to make sure the cruiser knew the game was up, and so she could be heard above the wind that was blowing across the hilltop. Denver, however, looked utterly unconcerned when she turned to face Intrepid. "Oh come on, did you really think I wouldn't want my deck back, besides have you even thought about how unsuitable it is as a snowboard?"

It wasn't a bad question, snowboards were designed to cut through the snow, whilst a flight deck was designed to support the operation of aircraft, and as Los Angeles had discovered only after she'd had her 'bright' idea, was that a flight deck was a bad choice when it came to improvised sporting equipment.

"No, but here's my opinion on the matter…" Denver began, and then before Intrepid, Gwin, or Shea could think to stop her, Denver pushed off the hilltop to the battle cry "RULE OF COOL!"

Thinking fast Intrepid sprinted after Denver, hoping to see the moronic light cruiser lying face first in the snow. Unfortunately as she regained a line of sight to her, Denver was still upright, which was a miracle, seeing as she was completely out of control as she raced down the slope, Intrepid's attempted warning having proved prophetic. Then, with a sudden scream of panic, Denver suddenly swerved off the run and into the trees, her scream not stopping until there was the sound of distant impact, followed by the ominous sound of cracking wood, punctuated by the tree Denver toppling to the ground.

Internally feeling a gnawing sense of dread Intrepid led the two destroyers down the hill and along the path of destruction that had followed Denver as she had careened out of control. Intrepid was already wondering how many pieces her deck would be in, at best she was expecting it would be in two chunks that might be repairable, at worst it would be the consistency of matchwood and good for nothing but scrap.

Eventually they found the crash site, but unexpectedly they found they had not been the first to reach it as a woman was standing over the comatose cruiser with her back to the trio. Denver had hit a pine tree head on and by the groove in the snow Intrepid guessed that the cruiser had tried and failed to either slow down, or have the flight deck take the impact for her. In fact it appeared all her efforts had done was to catapult her straight into the tree head first, snapping the hefty trunk like a dry twig. Intrepid didn't know how badly Denver was hurt, but by the relaxed posture of the woman, she guessed Denver was at least alive which meant she could focus on her flight deck, only to see that not only was it miraculously still intact, but that the woman had plucked it from the snow and was carrying it under her arm for safe keeping.

"Excuse me," Intrepid called, which succeeded in catching the woman's attention, as she turned to face the carrier. And then Intrepid's world froze as she saw a face that had graced her dreams over the years since she'd first seen it all those years ago. Short auburn poked out from beneath a black beanie, a patch of freckles were scattered across a button nose beneath a pair of dark green eyes. Bedecked in a navy pea coat that hid the hourglass frame that brought her up to the carriers eye level. Suddenly, Intrepid was glad that the cold had long since turned her cheeks red as it would have been impossible to hide her blushes as she usually did whenever they had met since that first meeting.

"Hey, Intrepid, I see your lot is just as crazy as mine," HMS Belfast smiled.

Why did it have to be her, of all the shipgirls on the planet why did it have to be the one that Intrepid had a crush on? Ever since they had first met, Intrepid had liked Bel, at first she had just seen the British cruiser as a friend, back when it was just the museum boats that were fighting the Abyssal's. A fellow shipgirl who had cheated the scrapman out of their pound of steel, someone who didn't see her as either the 'Decrepit' or as 'the Dry I', and with whom she could actually talk casually with. But as time had passed, Intrepid had realised that she liked Bel more than just a friend, which had caused no shortage of issues at the time. Fortunately, Bel had been oblivious as Intrepid had come to terms with this new development. And then she was gone, back to the UK to join the burgeoning Royal Navy shipgirl force as first the scrapped shipgirls, then their sunken compatriots had returned to the land of the living.

The pair had run into each other over the years, the occasional reunion of the museum ships who held the line during those dire early days, maybe the odd port visit, or convoy run, but most of their conversations had ended up in occasional text chains as the two had fought in their own theatre of this war. But even then, a message from Bel had always put a smile on Intrepid's face. Why did it have to be Bel right now?

"If you want to take your deck back I can get her down the slope with some help from those two, or do you want to carry her yourself?" Belfast asked, snapping Intrepid back to the present. She was about to ask who Bel meant by 'those two' only to remember Gwin and Shea were standing right behind her.

"Yeah, good plan… I should probably take her and you can carry my flight deck if you want." Intrepid replied, trying to get her mind back to the task at hand as she moved to recover the comatose Denver. Before quickly adding "These are Gwin and Shae by the way."

Belfast, made her introduction to the destroyers as they trudged down hill, before explaining that she had come over to the states to get some peace and quiet from the antics of shipgirl life, which she explained was why she hadn't told Intrepid she was in the same continent as her. After that she had asked why a Cleveland-class cruiser had thought it was a good idea to try and snowboard using a flight deck, which the two destroyers had kindly filled her in on. Intrepid hadn't talked during this entire time, which Gwin explained was probably because she was thinking about how to punish Denver when her silence was brought up. In reality Intrepid's silence was not thinking up a punishment for Denver, she'd already done that on the drive up, but instead it was because all she could think about was the redheaded cruiser who had given her so many lovely dreams.