but as she tried to zip the dress closed it's zipper caught. After some troubleshooting and a few gentle tugs, the abyssal determined the zipper wasn't the problem: the dress itself wasn't large enough to fit around her chest.
lol. lmao. Trin really is built different.
It would feel better if, instead of some ignorant beat cop, she was causing that fear. No matter how far-fetched the prospect of hunting her down was, the idea of recreating the scene on the corkboard, and becoming known as the woman who'd done so, kept Katie's hopes up.
All this is giving me this gut feeling Katie is going to piss Trin off enough for her to remember "oh wait, I am stronger and outmass her by many magnitudes".
God I hope her annoying ass ego takes a couple of dents.
One of those war games, she guessed. In a way, it was a pretty clever place to hide. The types of people who spent money on those overpriced army men would probably be too distracted by the fact a gurl was playing with them to ask any dangerous questions.
Bitch.
Can't assume people do things for fun?
 
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Now for the big qiestions. Is this the beginning of the end, the end of the beginning? Or just the lead up to the end of the arc before our poor Wo has to pull up stakes and move again?
 
Leito had chosen this spot on the western end of the southern bleachers precisely because it put a good amount of concrete between themselves and the weary eyes of the eldritch abomination.
I suspect that Leito is more concerned about how "wary" she is, but I doubt that she gets enough sleep...
Finally admitting defeat, Lincoln's captain directed the batter girl closer to shore, where she eventually settled onto a sandbar.
I suspect that being "battered" is more of a concern, although I suspect that she has played host to some pretty epic barbecue over the years...
If Shannon agreed with Trinitite that it seemed like a… haisty escalation, then consequences could come swiftly for Clifton, Alex, and herself!
I, uhh, think that "hasty" is spelled differently, but regional variance has surprised me before. I mean, like, I get the impression that "ax" is a thing. It just feel so lacking. What is one going to chop down with a hollow aluminium axe? Regional variances are weird...
Trin really is built different.
All shipgirls are. Well, except for the destroyers. I hope. and now I have a creeping sense of doom, but nothing good ever comes from addressing creeping senses of doom concerning the depiction of destroyers.
 
Trin's openly calling the company a fleet now; Is she slipping up, or is this a regular thing that just gets passed off as another of her quirks?
I think she's slipping up because she's grown more comfortable being around Alex.
What I do want to know right now is whether or not Alex is picking up on it, and is wondering "what's up with that?".
Could lead to him asking her about it soon, which would lead to some interesting places.
 
Fencer - Mother Puts on a Play
Omake: Mother Puts on a Play

Trinitite poked at the figurine of her mother half heartedly. Two weeks she had been here and while she loved playing with the little plastic fleets the navy had let her keep she was… playing the same games again and again got old. She missed the war games. Those had always been interesting and new. There were only so many different ways to imagine her now impossible reunion with Mother.
Well, maybe impossible. The navy humans certainly seemed reluctant to even talk about mother.

Things could have been worse. She hadn't been sunk, so that was something at least. She was also being fed, and her fairies were allowed to work on repairs so long as they didn't try to replace her guns and planes.

Though she missed Alex and his fleet. And the humans she played war games against. She even missed the day to day of working for the Jack in the Box fleet. Though she didn't miss dealing with the angry customers.

"Hey!"

Trinitite Looked down to the outside of her cell and blinked at seeing a group of ship girl fairy's each pushing a little ship mini like the ones she had. Though these were all American ships. In fact… one of the ships was a miniature of Mother.

Now thoroughly interested Trinitite lay down on the floor to get a better look at what the fairy's were doing outside her cell. She watched in delight as the fairy's put on a play about Mothers life.

Hearing about Mothers sisters made her wonder if she had what the humans called aunts. Though she doubted the ship girls would ever call a Wo like her part of their fleet.

When they got to the Fire, Trinitite cried, just a little. True she already knew the whole story, but that didn't make it any less sad.

At that point the fairies grabbed their respective ship mini's and hurried off. Only to come back a moment later carry a fleet of mini's that mostly matched the crossroads fleet. It wasn't perfect, but then neither was Trinitite's. It was so hard to find mini's with the right hull sizes and gun types when the creators of the game made everything so standardized.

Mothers ship girl mini had a black hat and veil thrown over it's head. But this time… this time the play was wrong. The fairies talked about how mother was consumed by her grief, which made sense, but, but they said Mother was using her fleet to play fleet! Like how the fairies even now put on a show with little plastic figurines! They said Mother was a terrible Mother who only cared about Trinitite and her sisters because they were stand ins for Mothers lost family!

Trinitite Stood up and slammed her fists against the bars of her cell denting them badly.

"That's not true!" The fairies stopped their play and backed up slowly. "Mother loved us! She listened to our problems, and she taught us about damage control, and maneuvers, and she did her best to keep us safe from the Fire, and she gave us ice cream! Mother loved us!"

Trinitite cried hot angry tears.

"How dare you! I know the ship girls changed mother! I know she used to be a ship!" Trinitite Hiccuped and rubbed at her range finders. "Maybe she won't love me anymore, the way she is now, but how dare you say she never loved me!"

Trinitite smacked the bars of her cell again denting them further.

"Because it's true."

Trinitite's boilers stuttered in her chest and her crew had to scramble to relight them again before her steam ran out.

U.S.S. Saratoga stepped into view, though she couldn't bring herself to look Trinitite in the eye.

"After they got me back, my memories were a mess. A mess I didn't want to remember." Saratoga said as she reclaimed her crew and the fleet of minis on the floor.

"But there you were, an ocean away outrunning and outsmarting the whole of the United States. So they asked me about you, about my time as an abyssal princess, and I remembered. Not everything, but enough to get some idea of how things had happened."

Saratoga finally looked Trinitite in the eye and Trinitite was surprised to see her Mothers range finders partially clouded with water too.

"I was a terrible Mother. I gave you all the bare minimum of attention, cheered you up with ice cream, and a pat on the head before going back to wallowing in my misery. Honestly, Jellyfish… I didn't deserve the love and loyalty you girls gave me."

"That's not true!" Trinitite hiccuped. "You were the best Princess, Mother. No other fleet was as lucky as ours. I saw how they were treated. You loved us. We weren't just there to throw away against the humans. You cared!"

Saratoga smiled sadly.

"The best of a terrible group, still wasn't very good. A human family would have called me a terrible, neglectful, mother. They would be right."

Trinitite couldn't help but to think of Alex's mother, and how differently she acted compared to Jellyfish Princess. And she cried because a little piece of her wasn't sure what to think anymore.

Finally she had found Mother. Or Mother had found her. But for all that she hadn't know what to expect of this moment. This meeting was worse than the nightmares where mother helped the other ship girls sink her.

Saratoga stepped in closer and rested her own hand over Trinitite's where they were crushing the bars of her cell.

"I'm so sorry. In a lot of ways you're as much a victim of the abyss as anyone else. And now every time I fight all I'm going to see are the sinking corpses of abused, indoctrinated, children." Saratoga said.

Saratoga took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"I can't stay here for too long. I have a duty to get back too. And you won't be allowed to leave anytime soon. But I have a few hours here before I need to leave, and even though I was a terrible mother, I apparently raised an amazing daughter."

Trinitite Flushed at the praise.

"I've been told you wanted to tell me about everything that's happened since… since the battle. If you're still willing, I'd love to hear about it."

Confused and upset Trinitite did the only thing that made sense. She talked to her mother about everything while regularly reminding her Mother she was the best Princess, and no matter what her messed up memory said she had always loved her daughters.
 
Martin Bajar - Meanwhile with Alex's parents
Meanwhile with Alex' parents
"She's not as tense as she once was", Paloma smiled as she told this to her husband. With all the words slipping through, both Paloma and Mitch were of course quite aware that Sarah was clearly a shipgirl. It was a bit strange that she pretended to be a regular young woman, but … something must have happened. Maybe one day, Sarah would trust them enough to tell them?

"Agreed", Mitch smiled back, "she's slipping up more and more. I'm surprised Alex hasn't realized just yet. Then again, he also hasn't noticed that he's practically dating Sarah."

"Not that Sarah seems to notice either", Paloma added.

"True, they really are made for one another", while Mitch initially had had some reservations about taking in the young woman, he had come to agree she was a good one. Shipgirl or not.

"I do wonder what kind of ship she is", Paloma remarked, "she kind of reminds me a bit of that time we visited the USS Hornet museum while I was pregnant with Alex. I don't know why."

"It would be rather implausible for the navy to allow a fleet carrier to take a year off", Mitch supposed, "I imagine she's probably something way smaller. She is probably a patrol boatgirl from one of those overrun island states in the Pacific."

"Oh, I agree, I can see a patrol boatgirl not wanting to go back into the fray", Paloma returned, "I just can't help the fact she reminds me of that museum visit so many years back."

"She'll tell us when she's ready", Mitch believed, "probably after she realizes she and our Alex are practically girlfriend and boyfriend."

Paloma suddenly couldn't hold in a laugh.

"What is it?" Mitch asked, curious what his wife suddenly considered hilarious.

"I just couldn't help imagining Alex' face when he realizes he is dating a shipgirl", Paloma replied, between laughs.

Mitch snorted, getting the same image in his head now.
 
Anyone else who had the same thing with Alex' parents? I knew the name of his mother. But had to search through the chapters to find the name of his father.
 
"It would be rather implausible for the navy to allow a fleet carrier to take a year off", Mitch supposed, "I imagine she's probably something way smaller. She is probably a patrol boatgirl from one of those overrun island states in the Pacific."
Are ships lighter than a small destroyer ever represented as shipgirls in this setting?
 
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Are ships lighter than a small destroyer ever represented as shipgirls in this setting?

I don't think they are represented as shipgirls (I don't think the OP has said anything either way, but I doubt it myself). But as the quote below states, Alex' parents are civilians. Would they know that? The OSP (which grew to be the Philippine Navy), had 3 patrol boats and 3 other small boats. That's it. Thinking Sarah/Trinitite to be a patrol boatgirl from an island state seemed a conclusion civilians could plausibly make. It would explain a lot to them. Yes, we know she's a fleet carrier (in the Omake, Paloma's subconcious realises too at that), but they don't

Even if you can't summon shipgirls smaller then a destroyer, that doesn't mean that civilians would know that.
 
Ehhh... I could see plenty of folk having relatively little clue about shipgirl specifics, but I would imagine that those who believe themselves to be living with one would likely do some cursory investigation out of curiosity. It would be at the point where it stops being "other people's problems"... and from their I would imagine a high proportion of curiosity out of general low-level voyeuristic tendencies, incidentals such as "what would be a good gift" or "would they be the one sneaking into the kitchen at night and eating all of our ice-cream" or "just how much food do we actually need to keep stocked", and the old "is our son going to explode from a misapplied pelvic thrust"...

I doubt someone who actually investigates shipgirls would be likely to miss that, while a shipgirl's specifics can be difficult to pin down, tonnage and ordnance do offer some fairly consistent indicators. At least if one ignores submarines, which seem to be generally weird, as exemplified by a possible "technically a submarine" quality to Re-class...
 
Are ships lighter than a small destroyer ever represented as shipgirls in this setting?
Abyssal PT boats are represented as swarms of angry toddlers? Otherwise I don't think they get any smaller than destroyer escorts, though some of them are pretty small for a destroyer. I think the bigger question for the Pacific-island-patrolboat theory would be how the summoning happened, since it sounded like everyone who's not Japan was limited in actually establishing summoning sites.

At least if one ignores submarines, which seem to be generally weird, as exemplified by a possible "technically a submarine" quality to Re-class...
That's not even submarines being weird, that's "Re-class, who is an entire carrier group with battleship escort rolled into one psychotic bundle, is an outlier and should not be counted".
 
That's not even submarines being weird, that's "Re-class, who is an entire carrier group with battleship escort rolled into one psychotic bundle, is an outlier and should not be counted".
That is entirely true, yes, but still... I checked out some awkward footage from an "arcade" kancolle that seemed to be about the closest thing to an official source for height comparisons, and Re-class seemed... maybe not necessarily lower head-height than battleships and carriers, but I think that she was about the same height, but with her feet comfortably above the water, implying that she is shorter than the ships she comprises. Then there is, well, I am uncertain how tight a Re-class' outfit is, but I would expect that if she and a battleship were to hang out in bars, that the battleship would be subject to more advances, although that would probably be mostly the homicidal death-murder tail... . Of course "subs are boats, and boats are weird, and Re-class submerge" is one explanation. Another explanation is that Re-class is an average of her constituent parts, and smaller vessels are more numerous. And yes, as so sagely proposed, "Re-class is an outright liar and don't got to explain nuffin!" is entirely credible.
 
Are ships lighter than a small destroyer ever represented as shipgirls in this setting?
Yes, at least in actual KC, don't know if they'd be in this story or not. In terms of canon KC designs the smallest displacement wise is Maruyu, at 274 long tons, but she's a bit of a odd duck in that she's supposed to represent her entire class unlike every other shipgirl. In terms of surface ships, the smallest they've gone thus far are various Japanese destroyer escorts, along with the recently added No. 101 Landing Ship. The latter of which would point to other landing ships also being potential shipgirls.
 
Trin's hypothesized identity was this:
"It would be rather implausible for the navy to allow a fleet carrier to take a year off", Mitch supposed, "I imagine she's probably something way smaller. She is probably a patrol boatgirl from one of those overrun island states in the Pacific."
The Philippine navy had three PT boats and two converted civilian ships of its own. New Zealand had control over its own naval forces before the start of the Pacific stage of the war, and had numerous ships that might be classified as patrol boats instead of minesweepers. Japan, of course, had an entire maritime empire. As far as I can tell, that is the entire extent of Pacific islands with their own navies at any point during World War II; everyone else relied entirely on colonial navies. The Philippines are the only one of those to fall in the dark grey zone.

However, the general failure of the colonial navies in the face of first Japanese and then Allied aggression led far more island countries to obtain their own patrol boats after the war. These were frequently surplus Allied minor warships or occasionally Japanese war prizes and thus eligible for shipgirl conversion. Such ships would be substantially larger than a PT boat. As they make up the vast majority of candidates, I assume this is what Mitch meant.
 
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However, the general failure of the colonial navies in the face of first Japanese and then Allied aggression led far more island countries to obtain their own patrol boats after the war. These were frequently surplus Allied minor warships or occasionally Japanese war prizes and thus eligible for shipgirl conversion. Such ships would be substantially larger than a PT boat. As they make up the vast majority of candidates, I assume this is what Mitch meant.

Honestly, I didn't think that far. But that would make sense in the Omake. But now you mention it, a corvette might be an option. There were corvettes active in the Pacific during WW2, the Bathurst class to name just one
 
Jade Isentry -going public
I originally read this story on SB, and I didn't know that it had a mirror thread here on SV. As a result, all the omakes I've written for it are only over there. But after writing and posting my latest one, (less than an hour ago), one of the readers there (@Martin Bajar) commented,

"Excellent Omake. Small question, do you have a SV account? If not, I'll post a link to the Omake on the SV thread so they can read this nice Omake as well"

😮 Color me surprised. So I have come here to rectify the issue. Here is a link to the SB post with the omake. If you want to see my other ones, just look at the Apocrypha threadmarks in that thread. @PyrrhicSteel gives credit to authors in the threadmark titles, and I use the same username there as I do here.

There are also lots of other brilliant omake writers in that thread, who probably don't all cross-post here. Anyway, here's the link:
All Wo-rk and No Play: An Abyssal's Trials in the Job Market [KC]

Any further omakes I write, I will try to remember to cross-post. Starting with this one. Here it is.


SB Author's Notes:
The last two omakes, with Mitch and Paloma having half figured out the truth got me thinking. If the Martins could accept Trin after having gotten to know her, isn't it possible that other people could? What if Trinitite threw out and rewrote the rulebook? No more hiding. If everyone gets to know her, how might her situation change? So, picking up from where AltTab's omake "A Rose for Sarah" left off, the following was born.


Omake: Going Public

Sarah, or 'Trinitite', as she had just revealed, sat at the table before Mr. and Mrs. Campos, looking for all the world like she wished she could melt into the floor and disappear, glowing eyes and all.

"We were hoping you'd trust us enough to tell us sooner or later, Sar… er, Trin. Although we had assumed you were a shipgirl. The abyssal part is a pretty big surprise. Care to tell us more? Why did you come inland here to the U.S.?" Paloma asked, reaching out and grasping the carrier-girl's hands to stop her from wringing them, and giving them a reassuring squeeze. Alex, sitting next to her, also put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. It was he who had encouraged her to tell his parents, after all.

"You're not mad?" Trinitite asked.

Mitch and Pam looked at each other, then back at their all-but-adopted ship-person. "Not really," Mitchel replied. "I'm glad we got to know you first though, or we might have jumped to some bad conclusions. I think we're mostly just curious and concerned now. Whatever could have driven you to abandon your life among other abyssals to come to human society?"

"Well, what I said about being a refugee from a pacific island whose family was killed in the war? That's true, but the other way around. My fleet… my sisters… they're all gone. The navy sunk them all." The pained look that flashed across the Wo's face for a second or two was unmistakable. "I only survived because they thought they had destroyed me. I was an all-but-dead wreck on the beach…"

And so the whole story came out over the course of the next few hours.

"...and so, here we are now. And I guess that's the whole story," Trinitite finally finished.

There was a long silence, during which nobody knew what to say. It was Mitchel who finally broke it, looking up from where he had been staring down at the table with a look of intense thought.

"You know… maybe I'm being crazy here, but… what if you didn't have to hide?"

"Huh?" Trinitite, Alex, and Paloma all said at once, looking at him. "What do you mean?" Paloma asked.

"Well, hmm… no, It's probably a bad idea, but hear me out. This wouldn't be a quick fix. It would be a long term plan, done in hopes of making a change toward a better future for a lot of people, not just Trin. It would have to be done with some very careful thought, and there's a lot that could go wrong with it, but it goes like this…"

—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Murray! Open up Youtube, now!" Nashville came bursting into his workspace wearing a look that somehow conveyed worry, dread, amazement, confusion, eagerness, excitement, and horror all at once.

He had barely opened up the requested site when Nashville pushed him aside to begin typing into the search bar. She hadn't even typed more than the first few letters "aby" when the search suggestions popped up what she was looking for. She clicked the search she wanted and quickly opened up the very top video on the search results page that came up. It was titled "The Story of a Real Abyssal, Told by a Real Abyssal", and was uploaded on a channel by the name of "CFS Trinitite".

As the video started, a familiar face greeted them. It was a face that they had only seen through grainy images and edited reconstructions up 'til now, but here it was, displayed fully and clearly in all of its high-definition glory. No makeup. Glowing eyes and all. Only her rigging was dismissed.

"Hello, people," the girl from the depths spoke, "You may find this hard to believe, but I am a real abyssal. I am a Wo-class standard aircraft carrier, based on a ship class that humanity invented, namely the Essex. I was once part of the fleet of the Jellyfish princess, who made her home on Bikini Atol in the Pacific. Her fleet was known as the Crossroads Fleet, and my name is Trinitite. Hence, the name of my channel, Crossroad's Fleet Ship–or CFS–Trinitite.

"My mother, the Jellyfish Princess, hated humans for what had been done to her while she was still a steel-hulled ship, before the humans that she had served sunk her, leaving her feeling betrayed when the Abyss raised her back up into the princess of the Crossroads Fleet. She raised us, her daughters, to feel the same, and for the longest time, I thought that all humans were evil.

The abyssal paused to let that sink in before continuing.

"I have, since then, learned otherwise.

"I have a story to tell. It is a long one, but it needs to be told. And I tell it here in the hopes of a better future. Not all humans are evil. Neither are all abysals–or at least, they don't have to be. Most of them are essentially just children who have been misled, and don't know that there's any better way. It's my hope that I can serve as proof of that."

The video continued as Trinitite laid out her entire story in excruciating detail, explaining every step of the way what things had looked like to her knowing what she knew at the time, why she had done each thing that she had done, and what she had learned through each experience.

An entire play-by-play account of the Navy's raid on Bikini Atol. The transformation of her mother into she-knew-not-what-at-the-time. (She declined to name the shipgirl that her mother had turned into, claiming that it was not her secret to tell.) Trinitite's destruction of Bikini's remaining resources and supplies to deny them to the princesses that had betrayed them. Her unwillingness to seek a new home among those princesses, her determination to find her mother, and her subsequent desperate flight to the coast. (She left out the name of the civilian ship that had helped her, stating that she didn't want people to cause them trouble for having helped an abyssal. "They were good people, and my first positive experience with humans, despite the horrible spicy food," she said.)

She told of her flight inland, and her "raid" of what she thought of at the time as an "enemy supply depot". (She said that she was sorry, and that she hoped she would one day be able to make it up to the Fred Meyers Fleet.)

She told step by step of her adventures learning how "money" worked, and how a person earned it, and of her subsequent trials trying to find a job. She gave heartfelt thanks to all of the good people who had helped her along the way (who she only told about in the abstract, refusing to name them or their places of business for their own protection).

She did name the McCally Construction Group as the first company she had found a job with, going on to describe her experiences getting to know coworkers, (who she stated outright that she was using false names for), discovering burgers, her pathetic and hilarious attempts to use the human food she had saved from the Fred Meyers, getting told to find "Breaker Coolant", pulling wires, bending rebar, her adventures with the "Death Trap" pulley system, and finally how she had been discovered, and had fled after protecting her coworker from the falling pallet.

"I didn't know why I saved him at the time," she said. "It all happened so fast, and I just… I did. He was a fleetmate, I guess. I'm glad now that I did. My current human friends explained it better than I ever could have on my own. 'He didn't deserve to die. You did what was right,' they said. I'm still learning to think that way. The idea of just helping because it's the right thing to do, regardless of what's in it for you. That concept is so foreign to the world I came from, but I wish it wasn't. Things would be so much better there if they could learn it. Maybe someday they can. I can only hope." The abyssal looked sad as she made the observation.

As the video continued, she became more and more vague about any identifying specifics regarding where she was, what directions she had gone in, who she was with, etc. speaking ever more in the abstract. It made her story ever more difficult to tell meaningfully, but she managed it. Murray was quite certain by now that she had had help writing her script.

She also interspersed her story with various casual demonstrations to make it as irrefutably clear as possible that she was indeed what she claimed to be. She summoned her rigging. She showed off her fairies. She loaded and unloaded vast amounts of random cargo into and from her own interior. And much more besides. All done casually while continuing to tell her story.

"And so, here we are," she finished. "I've learned so much about you, humans, and I hope that by telling you all of this, you've learned a lot about my kind as well. I hope it shows you a better way to see us, even as I've learned a better way to see you. Ultimately though, that's up to you, and I really really hope I'm not making a terrible mistake for everyone.

"Let me wrap up with one final thing that I can't leave unsaid." She closed her eyes, taking in a shaky breath, and then exhaling slowly to calm and steady herself. Then she opened her eyes again, and stared longingly into the camera.

"Mother, I haven't named you, but you know who you are. If you're watching this… please be watching this… if you're watching this, know this: I miss you. I love you. I don't care what you are now. There's nothing I wish for more in all the world than to see you again. Maybe I'm hoping for too much, especially as things are now, but as one of my human friends told me while making this video, 'A girl can dream, right?'."

The abyssal ship-girl covered and rubbed her face with her hands, breathing deeply to re-steady herself before once again looking into the camera. "And that's all. Thank you to everyone who watched this in its entirety. I know this must be a hard story for many of you to accept. Especially those of you who have lost homes and loved ones to the abyssal war. I wish I could make things right, but I can't. I can only empathise–another thing that I've learned the meaning of since coming here.

"For now, this is CFS Trinitite. Out."

The video ended.





Murray looked at the views count. Over 2 million and climbing, with over 100 thousand people already subscribed to Trinitite's channel. In one fell stroke, all of their efforts to keep the situation under wraps had been laid into a mocking ruin, and the lowly underling abyssal, not even a princess, had secured a greater level of fame than any shipgirl in existence.

"What do we do?" Nashville asked.

Murray rubbed his eyes and tried to think. "Not much for us to do," he sighed. "We go over the video and see if we can glean any leads from it. Or any leads that might lead to leads. As for what to do about the video itself? That's above our paygrade. I'll get in touch with the admiralty and see if they have any new orders for us in light of this. Beyond that, we just keep doing our job. We have a now famous Wo to find."

Nashville looked sick as she walked out through the task force's work area and made her way to the restroom down that hall, from which there soon came a horrific noise…

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!"
 
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