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Lieutenant Arisukawa Haruna

Balance Stats
❁ • Work / Life • ❁
❁ • ❁ Warrior / Princess ❁ • ❁
❁ • ❁ Radical / Respectable ❁ • ❁


Tactical Stats
Gunnery 0, Navigation +2, Command +2, Technology -4, Personal -2, Strategy +3

Stress: 3


PLEASE READ THE QUEST RULES BELOW

You collectively vote on the actions of Arisukawa Haruna, the first woman to serve openly in the Imperial Akitsukuni Navy.

This quest is set in a universe which is much like our own circa 1910, but with different politics, cultural norms, and ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as some unusual and advanced technology in places.

We are using this quest to explore themes like breaking the glass ceiling, divergent outlooks on gender and sexuality, colonialism and imperialism, and the place of royalty.

Content Warning
This quest goes some dark places.

There is violence, often explicit, often unfair, often against undeserving targets.

There are not always good options forward. The protagonist is not necessarily a good person.

There is implied content and discussion of sexual harassment and assault.

This is a world where people are often racist, sexist, queerphobic bigots. Sometimes, even the PC and the people they are friends with.

Voting Rules

We will tell you if write-in votes are allowed. If we do not say that write-ins are allowed, they are not. This is to prevent people from unrealistically hedging their bets.

You may proposal other options in a non-vote format, subject to approval, on non write-in votes.

We will tell you when a vote allows approved voting. If we don't say the answer is no, pick an option. We like making people commit.

Discussions makes the GM feel fuzzy.

Game Rules
When we ask you for a roll, roll 3d6. You are aiming to roll equal or under the value of your stat. If you succeed, Haruna gets through the situation with no real difficulties. If you roll above the target value, Haruna will still succeed, but this success will cost her something or add a complication.

Whenever Haruna loses something or faces hardship from a botched roll, she takes Stress. The more Stress Haruna has, the more the job and the circumstances she's in will get to her, and it'll be reflected in the narrative. Haruna must be kept under 10 Stress: if she reaches 10 Stress, she will suffer a breakdown and the results will not be great for her.

Haruna loses stress by taking time for herself, by making meaningful progress on her dreams, and by kissing tall, beautiful women.

Meta Rules
Author commentary is in italics so you know it's not story stuff.

Please don't complain about the system or the fact we have to roll dice. We've heard it before, we've heard it a thousand times across multiple quests. We're not going to change it, and it wears at our fucking souls.

Just going "oh noooo" or "Fish RNGesus Why!" is fun and fine. Complaining at length because you didn't get what you want less so.

If you have a question, tag both @open_sketchbook and @Artificial Girl. If you only tag one of us, you will be ignored. Seriously, we both write this quest.

And yes this is an alt-history type setting with openly gay and trans people, ahistoric medicine, and weird politics. Just... deal, please?

This quest employs a special system called Snippet Votes. Please read this post for more information.
 
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[ ] what do the enlisted sailors think of us?
[ ] can we get a scene of the officers playing games to past the time like Shogi, Go, Mahjong, chess etc.?
 
What happened to the ships we could have been posted on, but weren't? What's up with the steam ram, the semi-submersible mine layer, the sub with the rotating torpedo tube?
 
Hey just crossposting an important bit of worldbuilding from ADCQ over to here...

I think this is something better answered with an out of character post, and interestingly, it's something that @Artificial Girl and I discussed a lot when we started really digging into the worldbuilding for Castles of Steel, and we've been playing with since.

Basically, Akitsukuni has the opposite culture associations homosexuality that we do, without the association with gender inversion stuff that our own understanding went through. Rather, they sort of look at it (or rather, have recently, historically looked at it) as gay men being so masculine that they don't have a place for women, and lesbians as so feminine that they prefer the company of other women. Modern Akitsukuni sexual psychologists trained in the Western tradition have been proposing all sorts of nonsense about homosexuality being a form of gendered narcissism.

So this kinda bleeds into the culture of presentation, right? If you're a gay dude there's a stereotype of presenting extra masculine, working on your body and doing something physical or martial as a career, but it's pretty like... not an expectation? There's a lot of jokes about the army and navy being gay as fuck (some things don't change...) but it's not really derogatory, just a sort of crude, funny observation. That said, it's not something that stands out a lot? Gay dudes in Akitsukuni don't really signal super hard, because there's not really any shame in being a little forward about it or asking other men about their preferences, and there's sort of a low-level assumption in Akitsukuni that most everyone is at least potentially bi, everyone experiments, and that's totally okay so long as it happens in private.

The general trend for the fashion for most single straight girls in Akitsukuni in the past few years (clarifying that we mean women in urban areas who have the luxury of going out of their way to achieve A Look) is to try to play up being cute and approachable, nonthreatening and all that, sort of a reaction to fears about Westernization creating a generation of unloveable, coldly professional women. Things have changed on this front way, way faster than it did in IRL Japan, for the simple reason that half the Western advisors arriving in the country are women, in contrast to the weirdly lopsided social change of IRL Japan (with men changing from robes to suits in a generation, but women dressing and participating in socially pretty much unchanged from Perry to MacArthur). Young women can spend hours putting their hair up in a traditionally feminine way, but getting parts of it undone in just such a way that it looks endearingly casual, achieving that difficult makeup-free makeup look, and fashion pre-war was trending towards a simplification of traditional clothing for women with the slow intrusion of Western elements. Aiko in Castles of Steel, despite being what we might call a political lesbian of sorts, currently presents a decent example of this, especially in her experimentation with Western hairstyles and fashions. Kibe too.

By contrast, lesbians generally aim for what we'd probably call high femme, classy, stern, and often kinda retro, which includes a lot of like, overtly elaborate hairstyles and makeup. Because being forward is a lot harder for women in Akitsukuni, even among other women, signaling is used more sharply: the bracelets, colour combinations, makeup, lipstick, the signals changing season to season and geographically. Thirdly, there's pressure for lesbians who don't want to end up with men to pursue careers very seriously so they never need anyone else's paycheck. This has created a weird confluence, because actual coldly professional women have started adopting this high femme aesthetic as well to signal "I am focusing on my career now, excuse me", which then creates ever more subtle methods of signalling which are increasingly appropriated etc etc. Society has lumped all these professional women and their general look of tight hair and made-up faces as so-called "New Class" women brought up in Castles of Steel. At your company, Kobayashi is a really good example of that kind of person: she's straight, but has no time or inclination for relationships (admittedly, this is compounded by her origins). Haruna from Castles of Steel also rocks this presentation in the rare times she's out of uniform.

The war, of course, is mucking all this up. It's all in flux right now, and who knows what fashion and presentation will look like coming out the other side? Koide bounced between nerd-too-busy-studying-to-fashion to the casual-cute look and who is currently heading in a more New Class direction, for example.

Finally, we know a lot about nonbinary expression already, but the general rule of trying to aim for that neutral middle holds. Because of relatively small numbers and, frankly, kinda flying under the radar, there's not a lot of socially ingrained rules short of be identifiable behind this expression. Generally speaking, hair that is long-ish but loose in some configuration is a standby and has been for a very long time.


THAT SAID

There are still people who are non gender conforming under these rules too, and we know a couple of them. Satomi is actually a really excellent example in that she's as close to a butch lesbian Akitsukuni really gets, having a sort of boyish aesthetics with her short, loose hair and 24/7 jumpsuits. She faces a lot of shit about this from a lot of people, and a lot of people presume she must be nonbinary or a trans boy scared to commit. Satomi gets away and has a job because she's got rich parents, a doting uncle, and because she's now considered one of the best pilots in the country, but she's a little bit of a constant embarrassment. As always, there are people who don't fit the mold, whatever that mold looks like, and the mold is changing as we speak.

So, basically, Satomi reads to us as super a lesbian (in large part because she was first written before this stuff was nailed down) but Haruna is a much better representation of Archetypical Akitsukuni Lesbian than Satomi is. Peeps from Akitsukuni would look at Valentina from Mahan, an actual butch lesbian, and go, oh, somebody needs to tell that trans man that he doesn't just have to crossdress.
 
[ ] What happened to the ships we could have been posted on, but weren't? What's up with the steam ram, the semi-submersible mine layer, the sub with the rotating torpedo tube?
 
Hey just crossposting an important bit of worldbuilding from ADCQ over to here...

Have i ever said how much I love this setting?
Because I love this setting.
I like the turn of the 20th century stuff, it's not a setting I see a lot, and...
It's really interesting to see a world with a very different take on sexuality and gender relations, that doesn't draw on any particular historical or current inspiration and yet still feels real, and interestingly messed up in ways oft divergent from our own.
 
Interestingly enough Japan IIRC has stereotypes of gay men being super vain and therefore every well muscled and overtly macho (see for example Alex Armstrong and Jojos Bizarre Adventure and the subtext there).

The whole "doesn't have time for women" thing reminds me of attitudes on ancient Greece and Rome, and also to an extent of Prussia, specifically Frederick the Great. It does seem to be something of a pattern in hypermasculine soldier societies.

Lesbians as far as I know don't have a similar typecasting and seem to have "borrowed" western stereotypes, probably because women and especially their sexuality were invisible until relatively recently (something which the West also was not innocent of).
 
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3-20: Sneak Attack at Port Georgia
You and Kwon sat for a moment--well, Kwon sat, you hunched the over the table with a second set of headphones, concentrating. A whispered conversation passed between you as you tried to make sense of what you were hearing. You were getting better at this, but Kwon still had the advantage on you, and at last you relayed your information to Kenshin.

"Bearing… 229. Course South-southwest. Speed…" You looked at Kwon, your notes. Listened for a moment later.

"Speed I'd say is fourteen knots. Range now one thousand and fifty meters." Kenshin nodded and the information was relayed to the torpedo room. You took a breath, trying not to let the tension get to you as seconds ticked away before confirmation of a firing solution was relayed back to the control deck. Kenshin looked serious for a moment, then spoke clearly. Like always.

"Tube two, fire." And then, seconds later. "Tube three, fire!" Then it was the wait. The interminable wait. You still weren't used to it. With guns, you fired and then watched for your shell splashes and you could gauge the range. Firing like this? By ear? It felt wrong. As the seconds passed, you felt sure you had missed, then you finally heard a dull rumble through the water as something exploded.

"We hit something," you said, probably faster than you should have.

"Damn periscope. I can't get a good view any longer," Kenshin muttered. "Anything else on the hydrophone?"

You listened for a long moment, looked at Kwon who nodded in confirmation and then shook your head.

"Nothing. I can't make out her engine noise any longer, but she might just be too far away. We might have hit her, but I can't be sure."

"Mark it down as 'probable' in the log. We'll resume our course submerged. Stand down from action stations." Kenshin rattled out his orders and soon you were back on your way.

---

I-02 had been on its way to the north island of Shikotan, one of the disputed islands that marked the northern boundary of the Akitsukuni Sea. Obviously these islands were, by ancient tradition and current military occupation, rightful Akitsukuni territory, but international recognition had them as part of Caspian territory, and the issue had been the real driving force, more or less, for this entire war (alongside military buildup on both sides of the Joseon border, internal pressures in both nations, and a Crown Prince losing a hand).

For all that, they were remarkably dreary places, just dark rocky coastline, fog, and volcanic smoke with the occasional hardy shrub as best you could tell.

"There it is." Kenshin said sardonically. "The noble soil of our homeland."

I-02 was tasked, alongside several other minelayers of various description, with essentially turning every natural landing spot and harbour along the northern coast into a minefield, to ward off, slow, or disrupt scouting and landing. That a landing force was coming was inevitable, as was the defeat of the garrison, as the barren rocks lack of infrastructure made maintaining a meaningful garrison almost impossible. The trick was to make them work for it, and mines were a low-cost way of doing just that.

At the back of I-02 were the mine-laying tubes, which were a much more efficient mechanical method of laying mines than the traditional mechanism of dumping them overboard. It was not unlike a torpedo tube, but two-stage, releasing first the anchor, then the mine. The anchor was a steel hook attached to what to your eyes was a relatively flimsy looking chain, while the mines themselves were rounded cones, the upper half of which was dotted with little spikes. When a ship struck the spike, a vial of sulfuric acid was cracked, running down into a battery, electrifying it, and detonating the explosive.

When the ship was in position to launch a mine, the empty mine tube was loaded, the anchor in one tube, running out the back of the submarine and into the second tube. Then, both tubes were flooded, and the anchor launched off by a jet of air. The chain ran out, and a simple mechanical plunger pushed the mine from the tube and into the water. Finally, as the ship pulled away, it pulled out a cable that armed the mine, and in the process optionally filled the water with a fluorescent dye for a few hours, so minelayer would have no risk of hitting its own mine.

Personally, you'd been trained to oversee sailors just throw the anchor over the side, dump the mine with a chute, and then pull the cable yourself with a hooked stick, but the fact that I-02 could do all that while still underwater was an impressive feat. Not that you were underwater now, drifting along the surface. Hell, there were sailors on deck moving mines from the wet locker to the loading tubes, putting them back in the sub only to launch them out again.

The Navy works in mysterious ways, you reminded yourself.

---

The return to the main fleet had been fraught with whispered rumors and discussion about what was going on. Fortunately, as one of the officers of the submarine, you were lucky enough to find out when Kenshin piled all the officers into his tiny cabin once you had steamed back into the harbor.

"So, here are our orders--the admirals want the Navy to show some proper fighting spirit. Along with a group of destroyers, we're going to be going to lay mines in the area of Port Georgia. Then if we manage to lure their fleet out to chase us, the main fleet will pounce on them. Either way, mines or guns, we'll give them a good thrashing," he said with relish as he tapped at the chart he had half unrolled on the table.

"...We're not actually going into Port Georgia, are we?" Akio asked with a frown.

"No. We're not supposed to, anyway. I don't know what orders the destroyer boys have but they're probably the same as ours," Kenshin said with more conviction than you felt in that declaration. What if those weren't their orders? No use worrying about it, though.

"We'll be taking along the Ha-05, Ha-04, and Ha-19. Also, uh…" He looked over the orders. "The I-01, and… the Otamajakushi. Spirits be kind, that thing is still floating?"

"Somehow," someone quipped.

You thanked every spirit you thought was relevant that you hadn't ended up on that deathtrap. It spend more time being refloated than actually floating.

The briefing was followed by about thirty minutes onshore, during which time you managed to find and use a real shower and breath some real air, and then you were back on the boat, freshly stocked with mines and torpedoes. You'd be traveling through the night to rally with the destroyers, and attacking just before dawn.

---

"Five minutes to go time. Any sign?" Akio asked again.

You swept your binoculars over the dark horizon again, uselessly. The Otamajukushi was a specialized minelaying semi-submersible which could sail almost flush with the water… in theory. In practice, it tended to simply roll over and capsize in anything but the most still seas.
The last few times it did, nobody even died, they'd gotten so good at recovering it.

"I don't see it." You said. "Not that I would…"

"She's not coming!" You heard Kenshin's voice from inside the tower. "She flipped coming out of dock, they're fishing her out now!"

"Typical." Akio said, heading for the ladder.

You took a quick look around in the dark. It was a moonless night, still and calm, and with the lights out, there was almost no way to tell there was a dozen ships and submarines occupying this square kilometer of ocean. You could just, just make out the prow of Blade Squadron's Harutsuki, a cutting edge long-range ship.

You headed back to your station, and at 2am on the dot, the order to move went out. You were too anxious to sleep and besides that, everyone was standing to their stations in the event of enemy action. So you leaned against the doorway of the little radio hut and waited as cool air wafted down the open hatchway. Occasionally, an order would be passed down from the conning tower and the submarine would alter course, but long hours went by with nothing but the sound of the engines and murmured conversation to break the monotony. At last, though, just as the barest hint of twilight started to sneak down the hatchway, came word: you'd reached your target. The submarine turned, starting to move parallel with the coast and in your mind's eye you could see the other submarines following you, each of them preparing to drop off their rather deadly cargo--the sea mines you'd been assigned to lay outside of Port Georgia. The destroyers headed onwards. Theirs was the more dangerous work--to get right up into the harbor, fire torpedos, lay mines, and lure the enemy ships out into the newly laid minefield.

Akio had been incredibly jealous of it, and he couldn't understand why the submarines weren't honoured with such a task. You knew that a lot of the smaller subs weren't equipped to both launch torpedoes and lay mines in the same mission without breaking open the wet lockers, but you admitted a pang of envy as well. It was going to be glorious.

Your radio station was quiet. There were orders to obey strict radio silence unless absolutely necessary, lest the enemy discover the task force and the element of surprise be lost. Your palms itched--you badly wanted to be up in the tower, but you had your orders and you stuck to them. Akio was aft, supervising the mine-laying. You wished you had something active like that to keep you busy instead of hovering on the control deck, forced to wait for something, anything to happen. Minutes seemed like days and as it got close to an hour of waiting, it felt like years. Then, a sailor appeared at your elbow.

"Ma'am, captain wants you on the tower." You didn't have to be told twice. You clambered up the ladder with more enthusiasm than you really should've been showing in front of the men, but the movement was a relief! You clambered out into the chilly sea air and Kenshin nodded at you briefly before his eyes were glued back to his binoculars. He was looking north-east, towards Port Georgia.

"If we're on schedule, there's about to be fireworks." He said.

A long pause carried. Minutes, maybe, in anticipation. You found yourself counting the seconds in your head.

Then, there was a flicker of orange light, like a distant match being lit.

Another. And another. Then one that briefly lit up so bright it was reflected against the low clouds.

"Good fucking hunting." Kenshin whispered.

You watched for several minutes more as the fires burned, then went back below. Reports started filtering in over the radio, destroyers breaking silence as they announced their hits and started their retreat out of the harbour. From the sound of things, they'd sent a half-a-dozen ships to the bottom, or near enough to, and they were now firing everything they had in all directions as they steamed back out and the shore batteries opened up.

Then one ship, Hayashimo, reported a hit to the engine room that stopped them dead. Another lost rudder control and was forced to slow to avoid a collision. The shore guns and the other ships were tearing into them. At least two ships weren't making it out of the port.

Then you heard the call from the lead ships for the others to form up and fight, and you realized with horror what was happening. They weren't leaving the stricken ships without evacuating them… which meant they weren't leaving at all. They were going to bring their comrades out or die in the noblest traditions of Akitsukuni warriors.

You strained to hear through your headphones, trying to pick out each signal as it came in. According to the radio exchange, it might even be working. Apparently shore batteries were starting to drop off after a shell struck what sounded like a magazine, a noise so loud it drowned out one of the reports with static. Maybe they'd pull it off. Maybe they'd get out…

You heard boots against the top of the conning tower above your head, and then Kenshin calling down the hatch.

"Caspian forces coming in! Radio them! There's a whole fucking battlefleet!" He cried.

[ ] Enemy reinforcements coming! Get out of there! Roll +Diplomacy.
[ ] Enemy reinforcements coming! Last chance to do some damage! Roll +Diplomacy.

You don't need to roll to tell them what's coming. You need to roll so they'll listen.

The first option might save more ships. The second option might inflict more damage.
Adhoc vote count started by open_sketch on Mar 5, 2019 at 9:32 PM, finished with 3423 posts and 34 votes.
 
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From the sound of things, they'd sent a half-a-dozen ships to the bottom,
Good work destroyers!
Well then, they're gonna die. Or maybe not, since they seem to be doing ok with the shore batteries.
[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Get out of there! Roll +Diplomacy.
Not going to assume that what's true of shore batteries is true of Caspian battlefleets. Port Georgia is crippled, let's get the DDs out of there or we'll lose them all.
[ ] What firm is responsible for coming up with these submarine ideas? Or is this just the navy itself that's decided half-submarines are a good idea?
 
Those brave, stupid, beautiful, bastards. Mad Kudos for selling the ridiculousness of both the comical traditions of organizations such as the navy as well as the absurdity of war.
 
[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Last chance to do some damage! Roll +Diplomacy.

The destroyers aren't coming out even if we tell them there is a battle fleet coming in so best choice is to help them
 
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I'm very worried because if the Japan trend holds true, the destroyer captains may well be over reporting by an astounding margin what they've actually sunk in the chaos of night. For all we know, maybe Port Georgia is empty this fine evening. Or maybe it's not and a battleship or armored cruiser has been taken out of the war with the potential for more.

[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Last chance to do some damage! Roll +Diplomacy.

>_>

Destroyers are ultimately expendable in most circumstances.
 
[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Get out of there! Roll +Diplomacy.

The destroyers have done their jobs, now it's time for the subs to do theirs.

Especially since the destroyers are probably low on torps at this point if not out of them, and are thus nothing but target practice if they run into any capital ships right now.
 
[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Last chance to do some damage! Roll +Diplomacy.

This is going to get more traction, sadly.
 
[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Get out of there! Roll +Diplomacy.

Preserving an effective naval force is going to be key with what we know is coming, even if they are just destroyers. Besides, anything we can do to push back against the glorification of dying pointless stupid deaths in the name of heroism is probably a good thing in the long run.
 
[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Get out of there! Roll +Diplomacy.

It's not just their lives they're spending, it's Haruna's dear cousin's property.
 
[X] Enemy reinforcements coming! Get out of there! Roll +Diplomacy.

Saving the ships, and, more importantly, the people on those ships, is a good thing, but the destroyers can still help while leaving by tempting the Caspian fleets into the mine fields that have just been laid.
 
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