WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
We couldn't have done it without your assistance, though.
Kimi no Na Iowa, the zeroth draft (Kantai Collection/Kimi no Na Wa AU/Continuation) [Rehost]
- Thread starter WarpObscura
- Start date
- Crossover
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
Made some changes to the last segment as per @bldude 's SB comments. Please tell us whether they work.
"I didn't do anything," Willie replied bluntly. "Ping Hai gave coordinates. Ms Nakahara gave range. Uatu Two and Riptide accomplished the mission. Ms Shi---Shino-something---Akagi gave wisdom and you and Princeton extracted them. Yorktown and Tian Yan tied it all together. I did nothing."
She was technically correct. She had indeed done nothing; Ayaka hadn't had the chance to properly study the omamori that had been issued, but it seemed that they had burnt for her, taking on the burden of her so-called curse and preventing it from affecting anyone else. This time, at least.
There was that odd vibe again. Ayaka couldn't explain it.
...
"If there's any reason for me being so despondent, it's not any fault of my family's. My father and mother were very supportive and patient, no matter how often or badly I screwed up." She laughed, and there was some genuine mirth in it this time. "They could say sincerely what would have been platitudes coming from anyone else. 'Maybe there's only a dark road up ahead, but you still have to believe and keep going,' they said. 'Maybe, just maybe, light can reach the bottom of a dark ocean,' they said."
"Is the next thing you're going to say that you wish you could believe them?"
"I certainly wish I could!" Mina said sharply enough flecks of saliva flew from her mouth, and Ayaka winced. "'If we make the darkness shine, it will become a starry sky'? My ass! Their irrational optimism works fine for the rest of my blood siblings, but not me. Every light at the end of a tunnel has turned out to be an oncoming train, and everything from me that reaches someone is calamity!"
"Did you try for a backline position?" Ayaka asked hesitantly. "RADM Adams told me it was possible, back after my Reawakening."
"I was---I don't know why, but I couldn't run away to be a REMF. Wouldn't have been right. Ended up getting backline postings while being the hot potato. Still managed to break something even when told to sit still and touch nothing. Mr Coventry at Iteration Chicago couldn't stand for that. Gave everyone the mother of all chewing-outs for wanting to keep me safely away in a padded observation cell for study, the chivalrous knucklehead." Mina turned visibly green. "Mr Carmichael… the horror… the horror…"
"I'm afraid I can't help," Ayaka eventually said into the grim silence that followed. She wished she could, though. "The kamisama make no promises about plans to prosper us, give hope and a future." The dark days after her mother's death hadn't given her any special insight to share, and it was times like this that reminded her that, whatever their superficial similarities, she'd never inherited her mother's unique insights into the workings of the world.
Was there even a right thing to say to someone who she knew from literally painful experience had every reason to be so troubled?
...
She was technically correct. She had indeed done nothing; Ayaka hadn't had the chance to properly study the omamori that had been issued, but it seemed that they had burnt for her, taking on the burden of her so-called curse and preventing it from affecting anyone else. This time, at least.
There was that odd vibe again. Ayaka couldn't explain it.
...
"If there's any reason for me being so despondent, it's not any fault of my family's. My father and mother were very supportive and patient, no matter how often or badly I screwed up." She laughed, and there was some genuine mirth in it this time. "They could say sincerely what would have been platitudes coming from anyone else. 'Maybe there's only a dark road up ahead, but you still have to believe and keep going,' they said. 'Maybe, just maybe, light can reach the bottom of a dark ocean,' they said."
"Is the next thing you're going to say that you wish you could believe them?"
"I certainly wish I could!" Mina said sharply enough flecks of saliva flew from her mouth, and Ayaka winced. "'If we make the darkness shine, it will become a starry sky'? My ass! Their irrational optimism works fine for the rest of my blood siblings, but not me. Every light at the end of a tunnel has turned out to be an oncoming train, and everything from me that reaches someone is calamity!"
"Did you try for a backline position?" Ayaka asked hesitantly. "RADM Adams told me it was possible, back after my Reawakening."
"I was---I don't know why, but I couldn't run away to be a REMF. Wouldn't have been right. Ended up getting backline postings while being the hot potato. Still managed to break something even when told to sit still and touch nothing. Mr Coventry at Iteration Chicago couldn't stand for that. Gave everyone the mother of all chewing-outs for wanting to keep me safely away in a padded observation cell for study, the chivalrous knucklehead." Mina turned visibly green. "Mr Carmichael… the horror… the horror…"
"I'm afraid I can't help," Ayaka eventually said into the grim silence that followed. She wished she could, though. "The kamisama make no promises about plans to prosper us, give hope and a future." The dark days after her mother's death hadn't given her any special insight to share, and it was times like this that reminded her that, whatever their superficial similarities, she'd never inherited her mother's unique insights into the workings of the world.
Was there even a right thing to say to someone who she knew from literally painful experience had every reason to be so troubled?
...
Rejected/unused Chapter 19 and 20 content
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
While we work on Chapter 21, here's what was left on the cutting room floor for Chapters 19 and 20. We have no idea if any of it is going to be reintegrated later, but feel free to use as omake fodder if you want.
...
"At least up there your fog is mostly stable. Out here in the badlands of the South China Sea, it isn't anchored to abyssal areas. Retake an abyssal base, tear down its Infrastructure, but the abyssal fog keeps moving, refuses to go away permanently, and whenever the abyssals settle in they reclaim land magically. I doubt liberating the land is going to win either us or the Chinese any brownie points; these islands are going to be even more of a political mess if any of us live to see the end of this war."
"Ha! That won't be a problem!" Ning Hai said confidently.
Kaga frowned, mouth opening.
"Kaga-san, there's no need to rebut," Akagi said over a private channel. "Unlike us, Mainland China's inland areas are vast, with places that even today know not of abyssal bombs. It is difficult for them to truly understand what's it like to be in our dire straits."
Kaga nodded.
"The worst part is that even though the fog might not actually be hiding anything, we can't take that risk and need to investigate," Akagi continued aloud. "I suspect they know that."
…
"We're not kids!"
"No, you're just completed the same year as Tenryuu's brood," Kaga said.
…
Akagi pulled an arrow from her quiver and drew it back on her bow while shifting into a kyuudou stance, moving with a steady poise as if hundreds of enemy planes weren't currently inbound. Her aura flared to life, red with brown lining, and began billowing outwards in all directions, kicking up a gust and causing waves to radiate out from under her feet.
"The existence of eternity, the heart and the soul…"
Akagi let fly with the arrow and vanished, red spectres appearing to shoot forth from where she had stood.
A moment later, red spectres converged on her former location and she reappeared, now facing the other way, and kept her bow on her back.
"...they look like snowflakes."
There was a red flash
…
"What? No snappy comeback about how I just need to get over it?" Willie asked.
"No," Ayaka said softly.
"Huh." Willie turned to stare at the wall.
Unsure as to what to do next, Ayaka took a sip of her own drink, then another.
When five minutes passed without a further word, she said, "If you need time, I can leave you to it first."
After another five minutes without a response, she took the drink and rose so as to put word to deed.
...
"Because I've been there. There was someone who refused to give up on me when it would have been easier, far more sensible to forget and just let go."
He had, hadn't he? Refused to let things be? If Reawakening had instead come to her in that dark period of her life between 11 and 17, that particular Ayaka Shirokaze who was really Iowa wouldn't have done such a foolhardy thing.
No, she wouldn't have.
...
===[===]===
REJECTED/UNUSED CHAPTER 19 AND 20 CONTENT
===[===]===
REJECTED/UNUSED CHAPTER 19 AND 20 CONTENT
===[===]===
...
"At least up there your fog is mostly stable. Out here in the badlands of the South China Sea, it isn't anchored to abyssal areas. Retake an abyssal base, tear down its Infrastructure, but the abyssal fog keeps moving, refuses to go away permanently, and whenever the abyssals settle in they reclaim land magically. I doubt liberating the land is going to win either us or the Chinese any brownie points; these islands are going to be even more of a political mess if any of us live to see the end of this war."
"Ha! That won't be a problem!" Ning Hai said confidently.
Kaga frowned, mouth opening.
"Kaga-san, there's no need to rebut," Akagi said over a private channel. "Unlike us, Mainland China's inland areas are vast, with places that even today know not of abyssal bombs. It is difficult for them to truly understand what's it like to be in our dire straits."
Kaga nodded.
"The worst part is that even though the fog might not actually be hiding anything, we can't take that risk and need to investigate," Akagi continued aloud. "I suspect they know that."
…
"We're not kids!"
"No, you're just completed the same year as Tenryuu's brood," Kaga said.
…
Akagi pulled an arrow from her quiver and drew it back on her bow while shifting into a kyuudou stance, moving with a steady poise as if hundreds of enemy planes weren't currently inbound. Her aura flared to life, red with brown lining, and began billowing outwards in all directions, kicking up a gust and causing waves to radiate out from under her feet.
"The existence of eternity, the heart and the soul…"
Akagi let fly with the arrow and vanished, red spectres appearing to shoot forth from where she had stood.
A moment later, red spectres converged on her former location and she reappeared, now facing the other way, and kept her bow on her back.
"...they look like snowflakes."
There was a red flash
…
"What? No snappy comeback about how I just need to get over it?" Willie asked.
"No," Ayaka said softly.
"Huh." Willie turned to stare at the wall.
Unsure as to what to do next, Ayaka took a sip of her own drink, then another.
When five minutes passed without a further word, she said, "If you need time, I can leave you to it first."
After another five minutes without a response, she took the drink and rose so as to put word to deed.
...
"Because I've been there. There was someone who refused to give up on me when it would have been easier, far more sensible to forget and just let go."
He had, hadn't he? Refused to let things be? If Reawakening had instead come to her in that dark period of her life between 11 and 17, that particular Ayaka Shirokaze who was really Iowa wouldn't have done such a foolhardy thing.
No, she wouldn't have.
...
Castle_Bravo
The user formerly known as Nuke_Equestria
This is a mis-translation. The proper phrase is "war is the continuation of policy with other means." As Clausewitz wrote "We maintain…that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase 'with the addition of other means' because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs."
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
An easy enough correction to make, even if it doesn't change anything in this context, but thank you.
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
Anyone here know Italian?
===[===]===
CHAPTER 21
===[===]===
July 7 2023
===[===]===
CHAPTER 21
===[===]===
July 7 2023
===[===]===
"LCDR Iowa to the communications room," The PA system announced. "LCDR Iowa to the communications room."
Seated in Uatu's section of the Fleet Activities Yokosuka office, Ayaka looked up from the report she had been checking prior to getting it submitted. It'd been a few weeks and run convoys since the wrecking of the Spratly Island abyssal bases, and earlier today they had returned from exercises with the Sasebo contingent.
Ugh.
Kongou.
To be fair to her, the Britain-built brunette battlecruiser - ahem, fast battleship - had had an underrated record of avoiding death from above the last time, and retained now a keen eye for the ways of air defence and evasion.
That did not make her any easier for Ayaka to stomach.
It wasn't just that the older warship's miko-derived outfit was even more deviant than Nakahara's, what with the non-standard skirt colours and black thighhigh boots. It was one thing to know intellectually that Shinto didn't have a unified doctrine to be a heretic against, no Izumo Inquisition to not expect. Treating the robes in this tacky-at-best fetish gear manner left a bad taste in her mouth, even if there were supposed to be links between the class' namesake mountains and Shinto that justified their being so garbed. As Yamashiro had previously noted, this prurience for prurience's sake was quite different from the now-defunct sexual communion rituals miko of centuries past had practised, ones that her lineage had never been party to at any rate. The rebellious her of 10 years ago probably wouldn't have given a damn, even with her grandmother's insistence, but actually being part of a miracle had a way of opening eyes.
It wasn't just the accent which had probably been Barrovian once but had been marinated long enough in the metaphorical mirin and miso to end up as some sort of tortured Frankenstein's creation that would have driven Ayaka's old English and Japanese teachers alike into a confused apoplexy.
The other shipgirl's initial congratulations on seeing her engagement ring had quickly turned to hysterical shock on learning that she was not, in fact, engaged to the next highest-ranking single male officer in the chain of command, given RDML Abel's obvious unsuitability and CAPT Zelben's being married.
"Why would you not want your admiral's Burning Love?!"
The pained empathetic wince on Akagi's face was a small reassurance that she fortunately wasn't alone in this.
Speaking of Akagi, there had always been something off about her that Ayaka couldn't put a finger on. Her motherly ways obviously extended to this old yet new family-in-arms; Ayaka had witnessed her telling bedtime stories to the younger shipgirls before. That made the nimbus-like half-tangible cloak of snow and cherry blossoms swirling around her, glimpsed only out of the corner of the eyes and always vanishing under scrutiny, all the more inexplicable.
What was she needed for, anyway? Ayaka couldn't figure out why she had been called. If it was Uatu matters, it should have gone through Yorktown.
It wasn't anything dire, was it?
No, it shouldn't be either. No grim-looking gentlemen in dress uniform had approached her to express their regret to inform her.
Just to be sure, she tried divining and got a negative on both.
Why did she keep feeling, then, that there was some possibility she was missing?
She checked in at the front desk of the comms room and was directed to a booth. The yeoman logged her in to the secure terminal while she got seated before it and then took his leave, leaving her to wait for the connection to NAVSTA Everett to be established.
"Hello, Commander," the yeoman at the other end said in a deep, slightly gravelly voice. "It is good to see you again. The Admiral has deemed you uniquely suited to have early access privilege to the news you are about to receive."
"Me? Why?"
"What I bring you now is not so much focused on what it is about, so much as who it is from. Behold." Without further ado, he stepped to the side.
Ayaka's heart… boilers? Skipped a beat.
"Salve, Grande Sorella."
The woman previously hidden behind the yeoman spoke Italian perfectly.
How shipgirl warbooks worked was another of those mysteries that continued to defy conventional explanation. No one knew for certain what a shipgirl would look like until she made her appearance, and despite valiant attempts by Jane's to extrapolate from the ships' physical characteristics and history, there had been misses. Ayaka was sailing proof of that.
Whatever the underlying mechanics, shipgirls did somehow know who each other were despite never having seen each other in human form before.
"Jer...sey?"
That didn't mean there was no surprise to be had.
New Jersey smiled brightly. "It's been a while." She had blue eyes and long blonde hair with the sidelocks carefully curled into drill ringlets, topped with a tiara. Even speaking English there was still a slight hint of an Italian accent in her voice, enough to be exotically alluring without distorting the words into an indecipherable mess.
"We will leave you to your reunion with your recently-returned sister, Commander," the yeoman said, and promptly took his leave.
After the door shut behind him, Ayaka's gaze panned down and she immediately felt her cheeks start to burn.
Due to first university and then work, Ayaka had never really had much chance to see Kagami through her teenage years. Ichiyo had reassured her, though, that the younger Shirokaze hadn't started dressing trashily, returning home at unearthly hours stinking of alcohol, playing boyfriend hopscotch or otherwise exhibiting the signs of teenage rebellion.
Why was this relevant?
The dark sailor collar of Jersey's blue dress was easily missed against how its neckline went down and down and down. It went right past a silver anchor necklace, breasts unsupported by a bra, was briefly obstructed by a Miss USA pageant sash, and finally terminated at a pinstriped waist sash.
"Yes, too long," Ayaka replied, fighting not to openly display the anger and embarrassment of an older sister confronted with a shameless sibling. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
Was this how West Virginia felt most of the time?
"You look well. Better than expected, even."
"Better than expected? What were you expecting?"
The word had reminded Ayaka of that conversation with Mina already a month back, but before she could think on that, the first meeting with Quincy floated to the surface of her mind.
"Blonde…blue-eyed…too little to wear…"
Ayaka couldn't see any stars in her younger sister's eyes, but that was three marks on the checklist already.
QUINCY!!! She screamed internally.
There was a sudden thinness to Jersey's smile. "We never got to say goodbye after what happened 30 years ago, not that we were truly aware of what was going on then."
Searing heat.
Choking smoke.
The smell of gunpowder and charred flesh.
Mangled metal and meat.
"No, we wouldn't have been," Ayaka replied, her thoughts derailed. This wasn't quite what she had been fearing when the talk about expectation had come up.
She was still confused by these patchwork memories of her past life, fuzzy, incomplete, imperfectly composited from data, logs, what had been somehow left by her crew and who knows where else.
"Number Two is functional now?"
"Yes, he is."
"Good." Jersey's smile now put Ayaka in mind of Mona Lisa as a Mafioso, and reminded her that for all the second Iowa looked like some spindly socialite too eager to flaunt her figure, she was still very much a war machine incarnate. "It was a travesty how you were left in limbo for so long."
"Jersey… you should know that though I vaguely remember 6 years of slumber, I can't say for sure when exactly I stopped being the me you knew. Was it after my third decommissioning in 1990? After we were struck from the register the first time in 1995? Sometime else? I don't know."
"It doesn't matter to me that your present life started in a womb rather than a shipyard," Jersey said firmly as she rested her forearms on the desk before her. They were clad in blue opera gloves with white stripes near the top under Navy patches, a dark blue band at the wrists and a white star on the back of the left hand. Strangely, they were fingerless except for the third and fourth fingers. "We were from different shipyards the last time and that didn't change anything. You're still my big sister."
Ayaka felt like there was something in her eyes. "Thank you."
"At least you weren't left vegetative for the years it took to decide what to do with you. In fact, it's better this way."
Ayaka stared. "I… don't understand."
"Giving you a lifetime's buffer, that the explosion isn't the last thing you remember happening on your return, appears to have been for the best."
Do I really look like I have it all together? Ayaka silently wondered, trying to keep a frown off her face. She understood now what Jersey was driving at, but Mina showed some things stayed the same across lives, and this life of hers had put her through things she would have wished on naught but her worst enemies.
She didn't say anything aloud, though. This joyous occasion was not one to disabuse Jersey of her notions.
"That said, I wonder if anything will change after our old hulls are reactivated."
"I don't know." The steel hull was always somewhere at the back of Ayaka's mind, being part of her supernal anchors as it were, but as a distant thing she didn't really give much active thought in the day-to-day. It was one thing to command aviators like in a RTS, but that had not involved the full sensory experience from either the planes' or fairies' perspectives, and Ayaka had lived being transplanted wholesale into another's body before, though the exact workings of the effect still eluded her. She couldn't imagine what existing in more than one place simultaneously would be like, nevermind in such a vastly different form factor.
"On second thought, it doesn't matter. I doubt we will need to take control of our old selves." Jersey flicked her long locks in a diva-like grandiose gesture. "What is this I hear about you being engaged to a non-flag officer?"
Ayaka's brain froze for a moment, and not due to any deliberate willwork.
"JERSEY!"
Kongou cameo courtesy of Crusader Jerome from SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity.
Seated in Uatu's section of the Fleet Activities Yokosuka office, Ayaka looked up from the report she had been checking prior to getting it submitted. It'd been a few weeks and run convoys since the wrecking of the Spratly Island abyssal bases, and earlier today they had returned from exercises with the Sasebo contingent.
Ugh.
Kongou.
To be fair to her, the Britain-built brunette battlecruiser - ahem, fast battleship - had had an underrated record of avoiding death from above the last time, and retained now a keen eye for the ways of air defence and evasion.
That did not make her any easier for Ayaka to stomach.
It wasn't just that the older warship's miko-derived outfit was even more deviant than Nakahara's, what with the non-standard skirt colours and black thighhigh boots. It was one thing to know intellectually that Shinto didn't have a unified doctrine to be a heretic against, no Izumo Inquisition to not expect. Treating the robes in this tacky-at-best fetish gear manner left a bad taste in her mouth, even if there were supposed to be links between the class' namesake mountains and Shinto that justified their being so garbed. As Yamashiro had previously noted, this prurience for prurience's sake was quite different from the now-defunct sexual communion rituals miko of centuries past had practised, ones that her lineage had never been party to at any rate. The rebellious her of 10 years ago probably wouldn't have given a damn, even with her grandmother's insistence, but actually being part of a miracle had a way of opening eyes.
It wasn't just the accent which had probably been Barrovian once but had been marinated long enough in the metaphorical mirin and miso to end up as some sort of tortured Frankenstein's creation that would have driven Ayaka's old English and Japanese teachers alike into a confused apoplexy.
The other shipgirl's initial congratulations on seeing her engagement ring had quickly turned to hysterical shock on learning that she was not, in fact, engaged to the next highest-ranking single male officer in the chain of command, given RDML Abel's obvious unsuitability and CAPT Zelben's being married.
"Why would you not want your admiral's Burning Love?!"
The pained empathetic wince on Akagi's face was a small reassurance that she fortunately wasn't alone in this.
Speaking of Akagi, there had always been something off about her that Ayaka couldn't put a finger on. Her motherly ways obviously extended to this old yet new family-in-arms; Ayaka had witnessed her telling bedtime stories to the younger shipgirls before. That made the nimbus-like half-tangible cloak of snow and cherry blossoms swirling around her, glimpsed only out of the corner of the eyes and always vanishing under scrutiny, all the more inexplicable.
What was she needed for, anyway? Ayaka couldn't figure out why she had been called. If it was Uatu matters, it should have gone through Yorktown.
It wasn't anything dire, was it?
No, it shouldn't be either. No grim-looking gentlemen in dress uniform had approached her to express their regret to inform her.
Just to be sure, she tried divining and got a negative on both.
Why did she keep feeling, then, that there was some possibility she was missing?
She checked in at the front desk of the comms room and was directed to a booth. The yeoman logged her in to the secure terminal while she got seated before it and then took his leave, leaving her to wait for the connection to NAVSTA Everett to be established.
"Hello, Commander," the yeoman at the other end said in a deep, slightly gravelly voice. "It is good to see you again. The Admiral has deemed you uniquely suited to have early access privilege to the news you are about to receive."
"Me? Why?"
"What I bring you now is not so much focused on what it is about, so much as who it is from. Behold." Without further ado, he stepped to the side.
Ayaka's heart… boilers? Skipped a beat.
"Salve, Grande Sorella."
{Persona 5 Original Soundtrack - The Days when My Mother was There}
The woman previously hidden behind the yeoman spoke Italian perfectly.
How shipgirl warbooks worked was another of those mysteries that continued to defy conventional explanation. No one knew for certain what a shipgirl would look like until she made her appearance, and despite valiant attempts by Jane's to extrapolate from the ships' physical characteristics and history, there had been misses. Ayaka was sailing proof of that.
Whatever the underlying mechanics, shipgirls did somehow know who each other were despite never having seen each other in human form before.
"Jer...sey?"
That didn't mean there was no surprise to be had.
New Jersey smiled brightly. "It's been a while." She had blue eyes and long blonde hair with the sidelocks carefully curled into drill ringlets, topped with a tiara. Even speaking English there was still a slight hint of an Italian accent in her voice, enough to be exotically alluring without distorting the words into an indecipherable mess.
"We will leave you to your reunion with your recently-returned sister, Commander," the yeoman said, and promptly took his leave.
After the door shut behind him, Ayaka's gaze panned down and she immediately felt her cheeks start to burn.
Due to first university and then work, Ayaka had never really had much chance to see Kagami through her teenage years. Ichiyo had reassured her, though, that the younger Shirokaze hadn't started dressing trashily, returning home at unearthly hours stinking of alcohol, playing boyfriend hopscotch or otherwise exhibiting the signs of teenage rebellion.
Why was this relevant?
The dark sailor collar of Jersey's blue dress was easily missed against how its neckline went down and down and down. It went right past a silver anchor necklace, breasts unsupported by a bra, was briefly obstructed by a Miss USA pageant sash, and finally terminated at a pinstriped waist sash.
"Yes, too long," Ayaka replied, fighting not to openly display the anger and embarrassment of an older sister confronted with a shameless sibling. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
Was this how West Virginia felt most of the time?
"You look well. Better than expected, even."
"Better than expected? What were you expecting?"
The word had reminded Ayaka of that conversation with Mina already a month back, but before she could think on that, the first meeting with Quincy floated to the surface of her mind.
"Blonde…blue-eyed…too little to wear…"
Ayaka couldn't see any stars in her younger sister's eyes, but that was three marks on the checklist already.
QUINCY!!! She screamed internally.
There was a sudden thinness to Jersey's smile. "We never got to say goodbye after what happened 30 years ago, not that we were truly aware of what was going on then."
Searing heat.
Choking smoke.
The smell of gunpowder and charred flesh.
Mangled metal and meat.
"No, we wouldn't have been," Ayaka replied, her thoughts derailed. This wasn't quite what she had been fearing when the talk about expectation had come up.
She was still confused by these patchwork memories of her past life, fuzzy, incomplete, imperfectly composited from data, logs, what had been somehow left by her crew and who knows where else.
"Number Two is functional now?"
"Yes, he is."
"Good." Jersey's smile now put Ayaka in mind of Mona Lisa as a Mafioso, and reminded her that for all the second Iowa looked like some spindly socialite too eager to flaunt her figure, she was still very much a war machine incarnate. "It was a travesty how you were left in limbo for so long."
"Jersey… you should know that though I vaguely remember 6 years of slumber, I can't say for sure when exactly I stopped being the me you knew. Was it after my third decommissioning in 1990? After we were struck from the register the first time in 1995? Sometime else? I don't know."
"It doesn't matter to me that your present life started in a womb rather than a shipyard," Jersey said firmly as she rested her forearms on the desk before her. They were clad in blue opera gloves with white stripes near the top under Navy patches, a dark blue band at the wrists and a white star on the back of the left hand. Strangely, they were fingerless except for the third and fourth fingers. "We were from different shipyards the last time and that didn't change anything. You're still my big sister."
Ayaka felt like there was something in her eyes. "Thank you."
"At least you weren't left vegetative for the years it took to decide what to do with you. In fact, it's better this way."
Ayaka stared. "I… don't understand."
"Giving you a lifetime's buffer, that the explosion isn't the last thing you remember happening on your return, appears to have been for the best."
Do I really look like I have it all together? Ayaka silently wondered, trying to keep a frown off her face. She understood now what Jersey was driving at, but Mina showed some things stayed the same across lives, and this life of hers had put her through things she would have wished on naught but her worst enemies.
She didn't say anything aloud, though. This joyous occasion was not one to disabuse Jersey of her notions.
"That said, I wonder if anything will change after our old hulls are reactivated."
"I don't know." The steel hull was always somewhere at the back of Ayaka's mind, being part of her supernal anchors as it were, but as a distant thing she didn't really give much active thought in the day-to-day. It was one thing to command aviators like in a RTS, but that had not involved the full sensory experience from either the planes' or fairies' perspectives, and Ayaka had lived being transplanted wholesale into another's body before, though the exact workings of the effect still eluded her. She couldn't imagine what existing in more than one place simultaneously would be like, nevermind in such a vastly different form factor.
"On second thought, it doesn't matter. I doubt we will need to take control of our old selves." Jersey flicked her long locks in a diva-like grandiose gesture. "What is this I hear about you being engaged to a non-flag officer?"
Ayaka's brain froze for a moment, and not due to any deliberate willwork.
"JERSEY!"
===[===]===
Authors' Notes: The talk with Vestal will be flashed back to at an appropriate juncture. We haven't forgotten.
Kongou cameo courtesy of Crusader Jerome from SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity.
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Summoned/Manifested not appreciating junior officers as husbands
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
Summoned/Manifested, man. They can't into human. What can you do?
Akagi's reaction to the reaction was supposed to demonstrate that she too was in the same boat (har har), but evidently it wasn't clear enough. How could we have made it more obvious?
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
Jersey eventually had to go, and so they had hung up.
Ayaka had her own work to get back to, as things stood.
She still wasn't quite sure what to think. She was supposed to be overjoyed that her sister was back, right? A Summoned/Manifested Iowa would have been, wouldn't she? Why didn't she feel appropriately, overwhelmingly jubilant, then? Was it merely due to this reunion being at the remove of a video call, or was it because there was a disconnect between her previous life and this one?
Maybe she was just getting old. 10 years ago, the mere prospect of patronising a cafe would have gotten her sparkling with joy.
{Is that… Iowa-san?} A familiar voice asked, surprised, in Japanese as she was walking away from the communications room.
{Eh?} Ayaka turned. {Oh! Yamashiro-san.}
{Did something happen?} The other shipgirl slowly lowered her raised left hand.
{Everett wanted to speak with me. They summoned the… the first of my sisters.}
{Oh. Congratulations.}
{Thank you.}
Yamashiro sounded half-hearted, but then again she always did; Ayaka couldn't hold it against her. {One less thing to wish for Tanabata; it must be nice.}
One of the main customs of Tanabata was the writing of wishes on small strips of paper called tanzaku, which would then be hung on bamboo branches.
{You think so? I've never given much thought before to seniority between my blood and ship sisters. Is Jersey supposed to be the second sister or should it be Kagami?}
{Did you know?} Yamashiro suddenly said. {I was supposed to have three sisters.}
{One who would seek strength, one who would live for pride, and one who could read the tide of battle. Those were the three.}
Ayaka looked at her, a question percolating in her mind.
It must have showed on her face, because Yamashiro said, {I don't need to see the future to know what you're going to say next, that I only have one sister.}
{Yes.}
{There were supposed to be four of us. The Ise sisters were originally meant to have been part of our class.}
{Oh. If I'd heard, I forgot,} Ayaka said, embarrassed.
Yamashiro snorted. {Ise, Hyuuga and I were ordered as part of the same batch, unlike Nee-sama, but funding meant I was laid out before them.
{We were supposed to have been meant for great things. Ours was the first class of battleship with wholly-domestic production. Why, Nee-sama bears a name of our nation long before Yamato did, and I was briefly flagship of the whole Combined Fleet!}
Yamashiro's face darkened. {It was not meant to be. The ideals of our designs did not pan out and we were made out to be faulty battleships, the Ises revised so extensively that they were made their own class rather than being left as a subclass like Maya and Choukai or Ariake and Yuugure!}
She slashed her right arm out sharply enough that the sleeve made a crack like a lashing whip. This talk had evidently gotten her oil boiling; without a further word, she brushed past Ayaka and stormed away in that mechalupine manner Ayaka was getting a bit too familiar with.
Ayaka looked back in the direction of the offices and her unsubmitted report, then to where Yamashiro's form was disappearing down the corridor. Nakahara, she checked, wasn't in the vicinity, because of course it couldn't have been that easy. She could almost hear Yorktown's decrying the annoyance.
Casting another glance back at the offices, Ayaka grimaced and went after Yamashiro.
She was eventually found outdoors. The other shipgirl was standing outside the summoning building, staring at the entrance.
It was a warm and sunny day.
Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. The building, positioned at the edge of the clear blue water, afforded a good view of the Uraga Channel and the diminished but still-numerous ships entering and leaving Tokyo Bay. Horns split the air from time to time. On days like these, it was almost possible to believe there wasn't a war going on.
None of that seemed to do anything for the tension roiling beneath Yamashiro's outermost bulkheads, outwardly visible only by clenched fists, and those were obscured by the sleeves of her robes.
{I'm sorry,} Ayaka said as she walked up behind the Fusou.
{For what?} Yamashiro asked.
{Bringing up my sister's return and reminding you of your own situation.}
{What were you going to do, lie about why you got the summons? You who don't have a bad structural member in your hull?} Yamashiro snorted, incredulous. {It's not your fault. I know what the Gosei says, that to accept our flaws as they were without trying to better them would be to not have exerted all possible efforts and to be slothful, but it's not so easy to actually understand.}
{Would things really have been better if you had been kept as one family?} Ayaka thought the other shipgirl was giving her too much credit, but didn't say so aloud.
That brought Yamashiro up short. {Probably not,} she eventually said. {Our Admiralty had no problems splitting sisters up. Even without the unlucky number, we still had such misfortune. If we were four, might we have blown up mysteriously in port like Mutsu?}
Ayaka winced behind her back. {Maybe?} There was really no sensitive way of answering the question, not when it hit so close to home for herself.
Yamashiro turned to face her, hands relaxing. {I was expecting the worst when I heard that you would be in the escort force for the convoy. I was fully expecting some loud, underdressed bimbo here to lord over us as was her right.}
{Over here too?} Ayaka jumped in confusion and disbelief. {Why?}
{I may have been sunk already, but Nee-sama insisted I read the history books after coming back. You were Halsey's flagship for the surrender of this base all those years ago.}
Oh.
Ayaka remembered now, and it smothered her incipient hysteria like a fire blanket.
{It might have been your third sister our whole nation's surrender was actually signed on, and the second girl who kept him able to prosecute the war, but you were present when the surrender of my launchplace was effected, and being on that third launch day of yours the flagship of the man who once swore to take all our heads…}
{I guess I can see the symbolism in that,} Ayaka said in sombre agreement.
{Such misfortune.}
Ayaka didn't know what to say to that. How did you respond to the realisation that you were a symbol of a conqueror? The words had reminded her that Yamashiro had been built here, and also that she had been hesitant to ask if there were any IJN men alive today who had been at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal's surrender all those years back. She wasn't sure how she would have taken the reverse, if it was a post-Man in the High Tower world with a Kriegsmarine or IJN shipgirl coming to visit Americans she had played a direct part in the capitulation thereof.
Not well, probably.
{You don't actually have him in your fairies, do you?}
{Eh? Halsey-san?} Ayaka was pretty sure she would have noticed if the Bull was actually on board, and honestly doubted it - the man hadn't been on board for long, probably not long enough to leave a noetic imprint - but made to check her crew manifest nevertheless. {No, just a gestalt captain and admiral.}
{How strange… I know few of us have crew famous enough in that post that they created a clear clone of themselves, yet somehow I thought it was just me being unfortunate that Nishimura-sama's fairy is nowhere to be found.}
{Would it…}
{What?}
{Would it have been easier if he had?}
Yamashiro's mouth twitched and contorted as if she wanted to say something. {Probably not,} she eventually said after much visible struggle. {I let him down, after all.}
It wasn't just you, Ayaka felt like saying, but forced the strangely savage thought down, true though it was. Seven had entered and only one had walked away.
In hindsight, Ayaka wondered, was it really coincidence that the "Battle" of Surigao Strait happened 90 years to the day of the equally ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade?
Yamashiro shuffled to the water's edge and Ayaka followed. In daytime like this, there was no vivid multi-coloured skyline to be had, either from Yokohama or from Tokyo, but there was still something faintly magical about the vista.
{I thought I would hate and resent Wee Vee and the rest of Oldendorf's force more.} The younger Fusou had turned her back to the water, but she was looking through rather than at Ayaka. {Fear and loathe.}
{But?}
{I just… felt empty I guess. Disappointed with myself that I never got to fight back, go down swinging.} Yamashiro looked lost, head falling, and both her voice and stature seemed small. {If I had been able to leave a scratch, make one of them bleed, I could have lied to myself that I had managed to do something. You see how jovial Hiryuu-chan is around Yorktown despite their sordid past?}
Ayaka nodded in agreement.
{She landed what would have been, against anyone else, a mortal blow. And yet…} Yamashiro's forearms came up again, but there was only impotence in the closing of her hands this time. {Maybe a little scared, but more self-loathing than anything. Not---I don't actually feel burning, devouring anger though, no lust for revenge. Surigao was a shameful slaughter, yes, but Nishimura-sama would certainly have been as unsparing of Oldendorf had we been the ones ambushing with superior terrain, a prepared killzone, three-to-one advantage in capital ships and seven-to-one in escorts.}
{No, I don't imagine he would have held back. I don't know if the feeling is mutual, though.}
{How so?} Yamashiro asked quizzically as she looked back up, causing their red eyes to meet once more.
{Wee Vee seems to not care about the past. I think she said something like "What difference at this point does it make?"}
Yamashiro made a tsking sound. {No, of course she wouldn't. Glory is fleeting, but failure is forever.}
Shouldn't it be obscurity? Ayaka wondered.
{Every victor accepts his momentary success and quickly moves on, hungry for the next achievement.} Yamashiro turned once more to gaze on the not so distant Boso Peninsula on the other side of the channel. {What sears more the mind than a thousand regrets and wishes to correct a failing? The "if only"s, the "I should have"s and "could have"s?}
Behind her, Ayaka's mind drifted back to the 34-year old mystery of 47 lost souls. Happy ship, my ass, President Roosevelt.
Other Her made no response, not even the slightest hint of disapproval.
Ayaka had her own work to get back to, as things stood.
She still wasn't quite sure what to think. She was supposed to be overjoyed that her sister was back, right? A Summoned/Manifested Iowa would have been, wouldn't she? Why didn't she feel appropriately, overwhelmingly jubilant, then? Was it merely due to this reunion being at the remove of a video call, or was it because there was a disconnect between her previous life and this one?
Maybe she was just getting old. 10 years ago, the mere prospect of patronising a cafe would have gotten her sparkling with joy.
{Is that… Iowa-san?} A familiar voice asked, surprised, in Japanese as she was walking away from the communications room.
{Eh?} Ayaka turned. {Oh! Yamashiro-san.}
{Did something happen?} The other shipgirl slowly lowered her raised left hand.
{Everett wanted to speak with me. They summoned the… the first of my sisters.}
{Oh. Congratulations.}
{Thank you.}
Yamashiro sounded half-hearted, but then again she always did; Ayaka couldn't hold it against her. {One less thing to wish for Tanabata; it must be nice.}
One of the main customs of Tanabata was the writing of wishes on small strips of paper called tanzaku, which would then be hung on bamboo branches.
{You think so? I've never given much thought before to seniority between my blood and ship sisters. Is Jersey supposed to be the second sister or should it be Kagami?}
{Did you know?} Yamashiro suddenly said. {I was supposed to have three sisters.}
{Ace Combat Zero Original Soundtrack - Briefing III}
{One who would seek strength, one who would live for pride, and one who could read the tide of battle. Those were the three.}
Ayaka looked at her, a question percolating in her mind.
It must have showed on her face, because Yamashiro said, {I don't need to see the future to know what you're going to say next, that I only have one sister.}
{Yes.}
{There were supposed to be four of us. The Ise sisters were originally meant to have been part of our class.}
{Oh. If I'd heard, I forgot,} Ayaka said, embarrassed.
Yamashiro snorted. {Ise, Hyuuga and I were ordered as part of the same batch, unlike Nee-sama, but funding meant I was laid out before them.
{We were supposed to have been meant for great things. Ours was the first class of battleship with wholly-domestic production. Why, Nee-sama bears a name of our nation long before Yamato did, and I was briefly flagship of the whole Combined Fleet!}
Yamashiro's face darkened. {It was not meant to be. The ideals of our designs did not pan out and we were made out to be faulty battleships, the Ises revised so extensively that they were made their own class rather than being left as a subclass like Maya and Choukai or Ariake and Yuugure!}
She slashed her right arm out sharply enough that the sleeve made a crack like a lashing whip. This talk had evidently gotten her oil boiling; without a further word, she brushed past Ayaka and stormed away in that mechalupine manner Ayaka was getting a bit too familiar with.
Ayaka looked back in the direction of the offices and her unsubmitted report, then to where Yamashiro's form was disappearing down the corridor. Nakahara, she checked, wasn't in the vicinity, because of course it couldn't have been that easy. She could almost hear Yorktown's decrying the annoyance.
Casting another glance back at the offices, Ayaka grimaced and went after Yamashiro.
She was eventually found outdoors. The other shipgirl was standing outside the summoning building, staring at the entrance.
It was a warm and sunny day.
Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. The building, positioned at the edge of the clear blue water, afforded a good view of the Uraga Channel and the diminished but still-numerous ships entering and leaving Tokyo Bay. Horns split the air from time to time. On days like these, it was almost possible to believe there wasn't a war going on.
None of that seemed to do anything for the tension roiling beneath Yamashiro's outermost bulkheads, outwardly visible only by clenched fists, and those were obscured by the sleeves of her robes.
{I'm sorry,} Ayaka said as she walked up behind the Fusou.
{For what?} Yamashiro asked.
{Bringing up my sister's return and reminding you of your own situation.}
{What were you going to do, lie about why you got the summons? You who don't have a bad structural member in your hull?} Yamashiro snorted, incredulous. {It's not your fault. I know what the Gosei says, that to accept our flaws as they were without trying to better them would be to not have exerted all possible efforts and to be slothful, but it's not so easy to actually understand.}
{Would things really have been better if you had been kept as one family?} Ayaka thought the other shipgirl was giving her too much credit, but didn't say so aloud.
That brought Yamashiro up short. {Probably not,} she eventually said. {Our Admiralty had no problems splitting sisters up. Even without the unlucky number, we still had such misfortune. If we were four, might we have blown up mysteriously in port like Mutsu?}
Ayaka winced behind her back. {Maybe?} There was really no sensitive way of answering the question, not when it hit so close to home for herself.
Yamashiro turned to face her, hands relaxing. {I was expecting the worst when I heard that you would be in the escort force for the convoy. I was fully expecting some loud, underdressed bimbo here to lord over us as was her right.}
{Over here too?} Ayaka jumped in confusion and disbelief. {Why?}
{I may have been sunk already, but Nee-sama insisted I read the history books after coming back. You were Halsey's flagship for the surrender of this base all those years ago.}
Oh.
Ayaka remembered now, and it smothered her incipient hysteria like a fire blanket.
{It might have been your third sister our whole nation's surrender was actually signed on, and the second girl who kept him able to prosecute the war, but you were present when the surrender of my launchplace was effected, and being on that third launch day of yours the flagship of the man who once swore to take all our heads…}
{I guess I can see the symbolism in that,} Ayaka said in sombre agreement.
{Such misfortune.}
Ayaka didn't know what to say to that. How did you respond to the realisation that you were a symbol of a conqueror? The words had reminded her that Yamashiro had been built here, and also that she had been hesitant to ask if there were any IJN men alive today who had been at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal's surrender all those years back. She wasn't sure how she would have taken the reverse, if it was a post-Man in the High Tower world with a Kriegsmarine or IJN shipgirl coming to visit Americans she had played a direct part in the capitulation thereof.
Not well, probably.
{You don't actually have him in your fairies, do you?}
{Eh? Halsey-san?} Ayaka was pretty sure she would have noticed if the Bull was actually on board, and honestly doubted it - the man hadn't been on board for long, probably not long enough to leave a noetic imprint - but made to check her crew manifest nevertheless. {No, just a gestalt captain and admiral.}
{How strange… I know few of us have crew famous enough in that post that they created a clear clone of themselves, yet somehow I thought it was just me being unfortunate that Nishimura-sama's fairy is nowhere to be found.}
{Would it…}
{What?}
{Would it have been easier if he had?}
Yamashiro's mouth twitched and contorted as if she wanted to say something. {Probably not,} she eventually said after much visible struggle. {I let him down, after all.}
It wasn't just you, Ayaka felt like saying, but forced the strangely savage thought down, true though it was. Seven had entered and only one had walked away.
In hindsight, Ayaka wondered, was it really coincidence that the "Battle" of Surigao Strait happened 90 years to the day of the equally ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade?
Yamashiro shuffled to the water's edge and Ayaka followed. In daytime like this, there was no vivid multi-coloured skyline to be had, either from Yokohama or from Tokyo, but there was still something faintly magical about the vista.
{I thought I would hate and resent Wee Vee and the rest of Oldendorf's force more.} The younger Fusou had turned her back to the water, but she was looking through rather than at Ayaka. {Fear and loathe.}
{But?}
{I just… felt empty I guess. Disappointed with myself that I never got to fight back, go down swinging.} Yamashiro looked lost, head falling, and both her voice and stature seemed small. {If I had been able to leave a scratch, make one of them bleed, I could have lied to myself that I had managed to do something. You see how jovial Hiryuu-chan is around Yorktown despite their sordid past?}
Ayaka nodded in agreement.
{She landed what would have been, against anyone else, a mortal blow. And yet…} Yamashiro's forearms came up again, but there was only impotence in the closing of her hands this time. {Maybe a little scared, but more self-loathing than anything. Not---I don't actually feel burning, devouring anger though, no lust for revenge. Surigao was a shameful slaughter, yes, but Nishimura-sama would certainly have been as unsparing of Oldendorf had we been the ones ambushing with superior terrain, a prepared killzone, three-to-one advantage in capital ships and seven-to-one in escorts.}
{No, I don't imagine he would have held back. I don't know if the feeling is mutual, though.}
{How so?} Yamashiro asked quizzically as she looked back up, causing their red eyes to meet once more.
{Wee Vee seems to not care about the past. I think she said something like "What difference at this point does it make?"}
Yamashiro made a tsking sound. {No, of course she wouldn't. Glory is fleeting, but failure is forever.}
Shouldn't it be obscurity? Ayaka wondered.
{Every victor accepts his momentary success and quickly moves on, hungry for the next achievement.} Yamashiro turned once more to gaze on the not so distant Boso Peninsula on the other side of the channel. {What sears more the mind than a thousand regrets and wishes to correct a failing? The "if only"s, the "I should have"s and "could have"s?}
Behind her, Ayaka's mind drifted back to the 34-year old mystery of 47 lost souls. Happy ship, my ass, President Roosevelt.
Other Her made no response, not even the slightest hint of disapproval.
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WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
===[===]===
Later that night found Ayaka stargazing.
FLEACT Yokosuka didn't host its own Tanabata festivities, instead having interested parties proceed to Hiratsuka. The Shonan Hiratsuka Tanabata Festival, sometimes regarded as the largest celebration in the Kanto region, was a lively, raucous affair, set mainly around the Shonan Star Mall shopping street near the north exit of Hiratsuka Station. Hung-up tanzaku was everywhere, accompanied from above by divers gaily-coloured, intricately-patterned streamers and other decorations and talismans. A host of hawkers clamoured for the visitor yen, while games and contests drew a throng of onlookers. There were no visible scars of the damage the city had suffered 78 years ago.
After a final reminder, the dogs of war had been let slip, and both destroyers and the young-at-heart had disappeared into the crowd with haste.
Ayaka had hung back, wishing she still possessed that kind of childlike enthusiasm, and taken to walking through the stalls slowly. Even now, long past the point she had been deemed fit for discharge from the post-Fafnir therapy, there was always this background unease that accompanied her around these traditional Japanese festivities.
Her wandering had taken her down a quieter side street. The night was dry and cloudless, and she had a clear view of Vega and Altair, with Deneb's superlative brightness bridging the two. That said, it wasn't the same in the middle of a city, even an admittedly small one like this, not compared to how it had looked back in Imamura with no light pollution to obstruct the stars.
She knew the Sagami Bay coast was not far to the south. Barely a mile in fact. Had any of her company visited back then? Nothing was coming to mind.
Ayaka semiconsciously fingered a sleeve of the yukata she was wearing. It was blue with dull yellowish-grey four-petalled flowers and a red obi. The original had been destroyed along with her old home by Fafnir and she'd surprised everyone, not least herself, with her vehement insistence on having it remade. The obsession had been mysterious then.
It was positively ghoulish now that she knew there were kamisama alone knew how many of her for whom it had been an impromptu funerary outfit, and yet she somehow couldn't bear to banish it from her sight, much less outright destroy it.
"Corn pone?"
"Thanks, Augusta," Ayaka said, turning to carefully help herself to the tin the Northampton was offering.
"No problem, darlin'," CA-31 said as she daintily nibbled, her fine Southern accent betraying only the slightest hint of her long sojourns in Asian waters. She had large blue eyes and excellently-maintained auburn hair she wore loose down to the middle of her shoulder blades. She was wearing a green yukata with red peaches and other patterns rather than her usual long-sleeved, double-breasted blue blouse with its white wing collar, white pleated miniskirt, white leggings and red-trimmed green jacket. The geta she wore shared the same grey and red colouration as her pumps, though.
The heavy cruiser had been summoned back recently and was currently temporarily stationed at Yokosuka. If Ayaka recalled correctly, she was going to be transferred to Sasebo once there were enough shipgirls to stand up an amalgam and thus construct over there.
"Curious how Qixi changed after coming here, ain't it?"
"Un."
"So much else ain't the same." Augusta regarded her surroundings inquisitively. "I don't recognize nothing, not that my boys knew 'suka back then since we were mostly at 'hama. Wanted to go back to Shanghai, but the Pentagon won't let me. Even Atlanna don't behave like she ought."
How a proper Georgian sister had become a gaming-addled slovenly wastrel, exhuman - sorry, Natural Born was the polite term - or no, Augusta couldn't fathom. Such an unseemly misuse of computation devices.
Ayaka didn't respond.
Augusta turned and looked up to see her fellow presidential yacht staring unmovingly at the Summer Triangle, left arm outstretched as if trying to take the stars in hand, a distant, weary and, if she was reading it right, longing look on her face. "'owa?"
It was a strange sight, so very unlike a battleship, to look almost vulnerable. She'd seen destroyers with more swagger. Quite disconcerting.
Ayaka jerked and whirled on her, the arm dropping as she did so. "Sumima---sorry. I got distracted."
Augusta reined in the desire to chide her for such carelessness, which had brought up the unpleasant secondhand memories of Wilkes and Davilla or Hambleton and Ellyson's collisions. "Something the matter? You were staring at Zhinv and Niulang all worn slap out." Her pronunciation of the Chinese names was perfect, with no betraying drawl or twang. Nothing less was expected of a flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. "That Bongou get to you or something?" Entirely too much of a chatterbox, she was.
"No, it's just… due to our focus on weaving in our practices, Tanabata has always had an important position in the Shirokaze Shrine's calendar. To hear what my father once said, we were the de facto rulers of Imamura, which I guess made us all weaver princesses. Despite the years of service to Shitori no Kami, though, the idea of actually bearing that mantle never really sunk in until now."
Augusta reflexively winced at the careless use of "sunk". Natural Borns.
"I know that the Pacific is less than a speck of dust compared to the Milky Way, but the distance between here and home feels like a place further than the universe, one that all the tech in the world doesn't help much with."
To say nothing of a distance between Uileag and herself that had once been on a whole different plane from the merely spatial.
"That's a real hoot. Woulda thought you young'uns would have loved it that way. My kids would have wanted this kind of instant communication back then, rather than wait weeks for the postman."
"You would, wouldn't you?" Ayaka replied with a dry chuckle. "It's just not the same." She raised her right hand, palm up, to stare at it.
"You'll be going over yonder tomorrow, though, won't you?"
"That just adds anticipation in, building with every mile closer I get!" Ayaka exclaimed, before refocusing on Augusta. "Sorry. I mustn't be making sense. It must be hard to understand since you're used to being away from home for a long time."
"Oh, bless your heart," Augusta said sharply. "Just 'cause I got used to it doesn't mean I don't miss home sometimes."
"Ah. Sorry." Ayaka wrung her hands.
"SecNav, I still don't dig this human love thing." Perhaps prompted by how the gesture unconsciously drew attention to Ayaka's ring, or maybe the just-raised legend of the star-crossed lovers, a frustrated blush coloured Augusta's cheeks, like she wasn't sure she ought to be saying such things aloud. "My boilers go funny when I think of CDR Frisk; the colours around me somehow become more vivid and everything sparkles so brightly. Is that love?"
"Love?" Ayaka coughed. CDR Graham Frisk was CAPT Zelben's XO and thus the next available officer in the chain of command. How things would change once the Sasebo construct was established wasn't something she didn't see the need to try divining.
"Darlin'?"
"Love?" Ayaka's eyes lit up and her face twisted into a hysterical grin.
Augusta stared nervously at the sudden change in demeanour.
"Love?!" Ayaka unreservedly broke into laughter like the Metal Storm of bubble guns, bent over slapping her knee.
Augusta was bewildered. Despite what she had been taught about being human, she couldn't suppress the deep-seated fear that if the battleship keeled over in this unsightly fit, there would be no helping her up, not with the whole more than five times the displacement.
"Love was the last thing I felt the first time I laid eyes on a certain fight-happy, stubborn idiot with no sense of propriety!" Ayaka paused laughing long enough to shout, but resumed right afterwards.
Still confused, Augusta patiently waited for Ayaka's laughter to run its course before asking, "Pray tell, what changed?"
"What changed? I…" Ayaka blinked owlishly, "don't know. No matter how many times I think it over, I can't find a clear turning point."
That the line had already been crossed that fateful morning she had cried seemingly apropos of nothing was obvious; where exactly the terminator between love being in bloom and its having yet to flower was, not so much.
"Speaking of stories unknown, did you ever hear the tale of Zirgzar?" Augusta said.
"The what?"
"I thought not. It's not a story History and Heritage Command would tell you. It's a legend at least one of my crew must have heard somewhere on our many travels, yet whose providence even I'm not sure of. When history witnesses a great change, Zirgzar reveals itself as a great hero. As it was about to finally slay its foe, however, it was ordered to stay its hand, and then it died to those it had fought for. Ironic."
"What happened to it?" There was something about this that unsettled Ayaka, something more than just the echoing quality overtaking the other shipgirl's voice in the recount, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
"However, after a period of slumber, Zirgzar returns, this time as a dark demon, using its power to rain death upon the land."
Ayaka stared at the other shipgirl with now-hooded eyes. "You think it has something to do with all of this? With… us?"
"It might. It might not. So many of the prophecies and tales Iteration's sifted through haven't been worth a hill of beans."
That, they hadn't, Ayaka conceded. Still, there was more one thing that was bothering her, and she had to give voice to it. "I'm surprised you're not saying anything about me and Uileag."
"Oh, please." Ayaka thought it was admirably almost Japanese how Augusta looked like she wanted to snort but that it would have been too crass of her to actually do so, settling for a palm-down dismissive waving of a hand. "Why, a lady does not comment about another's choice of dedicated recruitment station, or even that she wants to limit herself thusly, and especially not to that other's bridge."
Original Augusta design and assistance with her portion from Dirtnap of the same. Our many thanks!
FLEACT Yokosuka didn't host its own Tanabata festivities, instead having interested parties proceed to Hiratsuka. The Shonan Hiratsuka Tanabata Festival, sometimes regarded as the largest celebration in the Kanto region, was a lively, raucous affair, set mainly around the Shonan Star Mall shopping street near the north exit of Hiratsuka Station. Hung-up tanzaku was everywhere, accompanied from above by divers gaily-coloured, intricately-patterned streamers and other decorations and talismans. A host of hawkers clamoured for the visitor yen, while games and contests drew a throng of onlookers. There were no visible scars of the damage the city had suffered 78 years ago.
After a final reminder, the dogs of war had been let slip, and both destroyers and the young-at-heart had disappeared into the crowd with haste.
Ayaka had hung back, wishing she still possessed that kind of childlike enthusiasm, and taken to walking through the stalls slowly. Even now, long past the point she had been deemed fit for discharge from the post-Fafnir therapy, there was always this background unease that accompanied her around these traditional Japanese festivities.
Her wandering had taken her down a quieter side street. The night was dry and cloudless, and she had a clear view of Vega and Altair, with Deneb's superlative brightness bridging the two. That said, it wasn't the same in the middle of a city, even an admittedly small one like this, not compared to how it had looked back in Imamura with no light pollution to obstruct the stars.
She knew the Sagami Bay coast was not far to the south. Barely a mile in fact. Had any of her company visited back then? Nothing was coming to mind.
Ayaka semiconsciously fingered a sleeve of the yukata she was wearing. It was blue with dull yellowish-grey four-petalled flowers and a red obi. The original had been destroyed along with her old home by Fafnir and she'd surprised everyone, not least herself, with her vehement insistence on having it remade. The obsession had been mysterious then.
It was positively ghoulish now that she knew there were kamisama alone knew how many of her for whom it had been an impromptu funerary outfit, and yet she somehow couldn't bear to banish it from her sight, much less outright destroy it.
"Corn pone?"
{Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War Original Soundtrack - White Noise}
OR
{Closure}
(Still trying to decide which works better with the contemplative tone of this segment; feel free to contribute your thoughts)
OR
{Closure}
(Still trying to decide which works better with the contemplative tone of this segment; feel free to contribute your thoughts)
"Thanks, Augusta," Ayaka said, turning to carefully help herself to the tin the Northampton was offering.
"No problem, darlin'," CA-31 said as she daintily nibbled, her fine Southern accent betraying only the slightest hint of her long sojourns in Asian waters. She had large blue eyes and excellently-maintained auburn hair she wore loose down to the middle of her shoulder blades. She was wearing a green yukata with red peaches and other patterns rather than her usual long-sleeved, double-breasted blue blouse with its white wing collar, white pleated miniskirt, white leggings and red-trimmed green jacket. The geta she wore shared the same grey and red colouration as her pumps, though.
The heavy cruiser had been summoned back recently and was currently temporarily stationed at Yokosuka. If Ayaka recalled correctly, she was going to be transferred to Sasebo once there were enough shipgirls to stand up an amalgam and thus construct over there.
"Curious how Qixi changed after coming here, ain't it?"
"Un."
"So much else ain't the same." Augusta regarded her surroundings inquisitively. "I don't recognize nothing, not that my boys knew 'suka back then since we were mostly at 'hama. Wanted to go back to Shanghai, but the Pentagon won't let me. Even Atlanna don't behave like she ought."
How a proper Georgian sister had become a gaming-addled slovenly wastrel, exhuman - sorry, Natural Born was the polite term - or no, Augusta couldn't fathom. Such an unseemly misuse of computation devices.
Ayaka didn't respond.
Augusta turned and looked up to see her fellow presidential yacht staring unmovingly at the Summer Triangle, left arm outstretched as if trying to take the stars in hand, a distant, weary and, if she was reading it right, longing look on her face. "'owa?"
It was a strange sight, so very unlike a battleship, to look almost vulnerable. She'd seen destroyers with more swagger. Quite disconcerting.
Ayaka jerked and whirled on her, the arm dropping as she did so. "Sumima---sorry. I got distracted."
Augusta reined in the desire to chide her for such carelessness, which had brought up the unpleasant secondhand memories of Wilkes and Davilla or Hambleton and Ellyson's collisions. "Something the matter? You were staring at Zhinv and Niulang all worn slap out." Her pronunciation of the Chinese names was perfect, with no betraying drawl or twang. Nothing less was expected of a flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. "That Bongou get to you or something?" Entirely too much of a chatterbox, she was.
"No, it's just… due to our focus on weaving in our practices, Tanabata has always had an important position in the Shirokaze Shrine's calendar. To hear what my father once said, we were the de facto rulers of Imamura, which I guess made us all weaver princesses. Despite the years of service to Shitori no Kami, though, the idea of actually bearing that mantle never really sunk in until now."
Augusta reflexively winced at the careless use of "sunk". Natural Borns.
"I know that the Pacific is less than a speck of dust compared to the Milky Way, but the distance between here and home feels like a place further than the universe, one that all the tech in the world doesn't help much with."
To say nothing of a distance between Uileag and herself that had once been on a whole different plane from the merely spatial.
"That's a real hoot. Woulda thought you young'uns would have loved it that way. My kids would have wanted this kind of instant communication back then, rather than wait weeks for the postman."
"You would, wouldn't you?" Ayaka replied with a dry chuckle. "It's just not the same." She raised her right hand, palm up, to stare at it.
"You'll be going over yonder tomorrow, though, won't you?"
"That just adds anticipation in, building with every mile closer I get!" Ayaka exclaimed, before refocusing on Augusta. "Sorry. I mustn't be making sense. It must be hard to understand since you're used to being away from home for a long time."
"Oh, bless your heart," Augusta said sharply. "Just 'cause I got used to it doesn't mean I don't miss home sometimes."
"Ah. Sorry." Ayaka wrung her hands.
"SecNav, I still don't dig this human love thing." Perhaps prompted by how the gesture unconsciously drew attention to Ayaka's ring, or maybe the just-raised legend of the star-crossed lovers, a frustrated blush coloured Augusta's cheeks, like she wasn't sure she ought to be saying such things aloud. "My boilers go funny when I think of CDR Frisk; the colours around me somehow become more vivid and everything sparkles so brightly. Is that love?"
"Love?" Ayaka coughed. CDR Graham Frisk was CAPT Zelben's XO and thus the next available officer in the chain of command. How things would change once the Sasebo construct was established wasn't something she didn't see the need to try divining.
"Darlin'?"
"Love?" Ayaka's eyes lit up and her face twisted into a hysterical grin.
Augusta stared nervously at the sudden change in demeanour.
"Love?!" Ayaka unreservedly broke into laughter like the Metal Storm of bubble guns, bent over slapping her knee.
Augusta was bewildered. Despite what she had been taught about being human, she couldn't suppress the deep-seated fear that if the battleship keeled over in this unsightly fit, there would be no helping her up, not with the whole more than five times the displacement.
"Love was the last thing I felt the first time I laid eyes on a certain fight-happy, stubborn idiot with no sense of propriety!" Ayaka paused laughing long enough to shout, but resumed right afterwards.
Still confused, Augusta patiently waited for Ayaka's laughter to run its course before asking, "Pray tell, what changed?"
"What changed? I…" Ayaka blinked owlishly, "don't know. No matter how many times I think it over, I can't find a clear turning point."
That the line had already been crossed that fateful morning she had cried seemingly apropos of nothing was obvious; where exactly the terminator between love being in bloom and its having yet to flower was, not so much.
"Speaking of stories unknown, did you ever hear the tale of Zirgzar?" Augusta said.
"The what?"
"I thought not. It's not a story History and Heritage Command would tell you. It's a legend at least one of my crew must have heard somewhere on our many travels, yet whose providence even I'm not sure of. When history witnesses a great change, Zirgzar reveals itself as a great hero. As it was about to finally slay its foe, however, it was ordered to stay its hand, and then it died to those it had fought for. Ironic."
"What happened to it?" There was something about this that unsettled Ayaka, something more than just the echoing quality overtaking the other shipgirl's voice in the recount, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
"However, after a period of slumber, Zirgzar returns, this time as a dark demon, using its power to rain death upon the land."
Ayaka stared at the other shipgirl with now-hooded eyes. "You think it has something to do with all of this? With… us?"
"It might. It might not. So many of the prophecies and tales Iteration's sifted through haven't been worth a hill of beans."
That, they hadn't, Ayaka conceded. Still, there was more one thing that was bothering her, and she had to give voice to it. "I'm surprised you're not saying anything about me and Uileag."
"Oh, please." Ayaka thought it was admirably almost Japanese how Augusta looked like she wanted to snort but that it would have been too crass of her to actually do so, settling for a palm-down dismissive waving of a hand. "Why, a lady does not comment about another's choice of dedicated recruitment station, or even that she wants to limit herself thusly, and especially not to that other's bridge."
===[===]===
Original Augusta design and assistance with her portion from Dirtnap of the same. Our many thanks!
Last edited:
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
I...genuinely don't understand this line?
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
We'll spell it out explicitly once we get to the talk with Vestal, but here are some hints in the meantime:
1. The very reason Ayaka needed to speak with Vestal
2. What she just said to Augusta, a similar concern which was brought up both earlier in this segment and in the first segment of this chapter
3. What does a navy get from a recruitment station?
Please use spoiler boxes if you're going to guess here!
im going to guess that its
new recruits?
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
A tiny bit warmer, but not yet there. Consider the other two hints.
Devil Trigger dance
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
Next segment still in progress, but have some art meant for CH20 that only got completed recently.
Chapter 21
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
There is turning out to be enough content here to make two chapters, and certain event demands to not share the spotlight. Since no major changes have been demanded of the hitherto present segments, here we are with Chapter 21.
"LCDR Iowa to the communications room," The PA system announced. "LCDR Iowa to the communications room."
Seated in Uatu's section of the Fleet Activities Yokosuka office, Ayaka looked up from the report she had been checking prior to getting it submitted. It'd been a few weeks and run convoys since the wrecking of the Spratly Island abyssal bases, and earlier today they had returned from exercises with the Sasebo contingent.
Ugh.
Kongou.
To be fair to her, the Britain-built brunette battlecruiser - ahem, fast battleship - had had an underrated record of avoiding death from above the last time, and retained now a keen eye for the ways of air defence and evasion.
That did not make her any easier for Ayaka to stomach.
It wasn't just that the older warship's miko-derived outfit was even more deviant than Nakahara's, what with the non-standard skirt colours and black thighhigh boots. It was one thing to know intellectually that Shinto didn't have a unified doctrine to be a heretic against, no Izumo Inquisition to not expect. Treating the robes in this tacky-at-best fetish gear manner left a bad taste in her mouth, even if there were supposed to be links between the class' namesake mountains and Shinto that justified their being so garbed. As Yamashiro had previously noted, this was prurience for prurience's sake. Quite different from the now-defunct sexual communion rituals miko of centuries past had practised, ones that her lineage had never been party to at any rate. Even then, said miko would have been properly-attired before and after the act, not prancing around in a public state of undress. The rebellious her of 10 years ago probably wouldn't have given a damn, even with her grandmother's insistence, but actually being part of a miracle had a way of opening eyes.
It wasn't just the accent which had probably been Barrovian once but had been marinated long enough in the metaphorical mirin and miso to end up as some sort of tortured Frankenstein's creation that would have driven Ayaka's old English and Japanese teachers alike into a confused apoplexy.
The other shipgirl's initial congratulations on seeing her engagement ring had quickly turned to hysterical shock on learning that she was not, in fact, engaged to the next highest-ranking single male officer in the chain of command, given RDML Abel's obvious unsuitability and CAPT Zelben's being married.
"Why would you not want your admiral's Burning Love?!"
The pained empathetic wince on Akagi's face was a small reassurance that she fortunately wasn't alone in this. Kongou hadn't actually been the first Summoned/Manifested to mention it, just the most blatant.
Speaking of Akagi, there had always been something off about her that Ayaka couldn't put a finger on. Her motherly ways obviously extended to this old yet new family-in-arms; Ayaka had witnessed her telling bedtime stories to the younger shipgirls before. That made the nimbus-like half-tangible cloak of snow and cherry blossoms swirling around her, glimpsed only out of the corner of the eyes and always vanishing under scrutiny, all the more inexplicable.
What was she needed for, anyway? Ayaka couldn't figure out why she had been called. If it was Uatu matters, it should have gone through Yorktown.
It wasn't anything dire, was it? Ayaka wondered abruptly.
No, it shouldn't be either. No grim-looking gentlemen in dress uniform had approached her to express their regret to inform her.
Just to be sure, she tried divining and got a negative on both.
Why did she keep feeling, then, that there was some possibility she was missing?
She checked in at the front desk of the comms room and was directed to a booth. The yeoman logged her in to the secure terminal while she got seated before it and then took his leave, leaving her to wait for the connection to NAVSTA Everett to be established.
"Hello, Commander," the yeoman at the other end said in a deep, gravelly voice. "It is good to see you again. The Admiral has deemed you uniquely suited to have early access privilege to the news you are about to receive."
"Me? Why?"
"What I bring you now is not so much focused on what it is about, so much as who it is from. Behold." Without further ado, he stepped to the side.
Ayaka's heart… boilers? Skipped a beat.
"Salve, Grande Sorella."
The woman previously hidden behind the yeoman spoke Italian perfectly.
How shipgirl warbooks worked was another of those mysteries that continued to defy conventional explanation. No one knew for certain what a shipgirl would look like until she made her appearance, and despite valiant attempts by Jane's to extrapolate from the ships' physical characteristics and history, there had been misses. Ayaka was sailing proof of that.
Whatever the underlying mechanics, shipgirls did somehow know who each other were despite never having seen each other in human form before.
"Jer...sey?"
That didn't mean there was no surprise to be had.
New Jersey smiled brightly. "It's been a while." She had blue eyes and long blonde hair with the sidelocks carefully curled into drill ringlets, topped with a tiara. There was a hint of noble aquiline cast to her features. Even speaking English there was still a slight hint of Italian to the self-assured Joisey but old money smooth accent in her voice, enough to be exotically alluring without distorting the words into an indecipherable mess.
"We will leave you to your reunion with your recently-returned sister, Commander," the yeoman said, and promptly took his leave.
After the door shut behind him, Ayaka's gaze panned down and she immediately felt her cheeks start to burn.
Due to first university and then work, Ayaka had never really had much chance to see Kagami through her teenage years. Ichiyo had reassured her, though, that the younger Godai/Shirokaze hadn't started dressing trashily, returning home at unearthly hours stinking of alcohol, playing boyfriend hopscotch or otherwise exhibiting the signs of teenage rebellion.
Why was this relevant?
The dark sailor collar of Jersey's blue dress was easily missed against how its neckline went down and down and down some more. It went right past a silver anchor necklace, breasts unsupported by a bra, was briefly obstructed by a Miss USA pageant sash, and finally terminated at a pinstriped waist sash.
"Yes, too long," Ayaka replied, fighting not to openly display the anger and embarrassment of an older sister confronted with a shameless sibling. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
Was this how West Virginia felt most of the time?
"You look well. Better than expected, even."
"Better than expected? What were you expecting?"
The word had reminded Ayaka of that conversation with Mina already a month back, but before she could think on that, the first meeting with Quincy floated to the surface of her mind.
"Blonde…blue-eyed…too little to wear…"
Ayaka couldn't see any stars in her younger sister's eyes, but that was three marks on the checklist already.
QUINCY!!! She screamed internally.
There was a whiplash-inducingly sudden thinness to Jersey's smile. "We never got to say goodbye after what happened 30 years ago, not that we were truly aware of what was going on then."
Searing heat.
Choking smoke.
The smell of gunpowder and charred flesh.
Mangled metal and meat.
"No, we wouldn't have been," Ayaka replied, her thoughts derailed. This wasn't quite what she had been fearing when the talk about expectation had come up.
She was still confused by these patchwork memories of her past life, fuzzy, incomplete, imperfectly composited from data, logs, what had been somehow left by her crew and who knows where else.
"Number Two is functional now?"
"Yes, he is."
"Good." Jersey's smile now put Ayaka in mind of Mona Lisa as a Mafioso, and reminded her that for all the second Iowa looked like some spindly socialite too eager to flaunt her figure, she was still very much a war machine incarnate, the most decorated American battleship. "It was a travesty how you were left in limbo for so long."
"Jersey… you should know that though I vaguely remember 6 years of slumber, I can't say for sure when exactly I stopped being the me you knew. Was it after my third decommissioning in 1990? After we were struck from the register the first time in 1995? Sometime else? I don't know."
"It doesn't matter to me that your present life started in a womb rather than a shipyard," Jersey said firmly as she rested her forearms on the desk before her. They were clad in blue opera gloves with white stripes near the top under Navy patches, a dark blue band at the wrists and a white star on the back of the left hand. Strangely, they were fingerless except for the third and fourth fingers. "We were from different shipyards the last time and that didn't change anything. It still doesn't change anything that I came back in response to a summoning. You're still my big sister."
Ayaka felt like there was something in her eyes. "Thank you."
"At least you weren't left vegetative for the years it took to decide what to do with you. In fact, it's better this way."
Ayaka stared. "I… don't understand."
"Giving you a lifetime's buffer, that the explosion isn't the last thing you remember happening on your return, appears to have been for the best."
Do I really look like I have it all together? Ayaka silently wondered, trying to keep a frown off her face. She understood now what Jersey was driving at, but Mina showed some things stayed the same across lives, and this life of hers had put her through things she would have wished on naught but her worst enemies.
She didn't say anything aloud, though. This joyous occasion was not one to disabuse Jersey of her notions.
"That said, I wonder if anything will change after our old hulls are reactivated."
"I don't know." The steel hull was always somewhere at the back of Ayaka's mind, being part of her supernal anchors as it were, but as a distant thing she didn't really give much active thought in the day-to-day. Commanding aviators was like in a RTS, where one was always at a remove, visual input viewed like through a screen, and while Ayaka had lived being transplanted wholesale into another's body before, she couldn't imagine what existing in more than one place simultaneously would be like, nevermind in such a vastly different form factor.
"On second thought, it doesn't matter. I doubt we will need to take control of our old selves." Jersey flicked her long locks in a diva-like grandiose gesture. "What is this I hear about you being engaged to a non-flag officer?"
Ayaka's brain froze for a moment, and not due to any deliberate willwork.
"JERSEY!"
Jersey eventually had to go, and so they had hung up.
Ayaka had her own work to get back to, as things stood.
She still wasn't quite sure what to think. She was supposed to be overjoyed that her sister was back, right? A Summoned/Manifested Iowa would have been, wouldn't she? Why didn't she feel appropriately, overwhelmingly jubilant, then? Was it merely due to this reunion being at the remove of a video call, or was it because there was a disconnect between her previous life and this one?
Maybe she was just getting old. 10 years ago, the mere prospect of patronising a cafe would have gotten her sparkling with joy.
{Is that… Iowa-san?} A familiar voice asked, surprised, in Japanese as she was walking away from the communications room.
{Eh?} Ayaka turned. {Oh! Yamashiro-san.}
{Did something happen?} The other shipgirl slowly lowered her raised left hand.
{Everett wanted to speak with me. They summoned the… the first of my sisters.}
{Oh. Congratulations.}
{Thank you.}
Yamashiro sounded half-hearted, but then again she always did; Ayaka couldn't hold it against her. {One less thing to wish for Tanabata; it must be nice.}
One of the main customs of Tanabata was the writing of wishes on small strips of paper called tanzaku, which would then be hung on bamboo branches.
{You think so? I've never given much thought before to seniority between my blood and ship sisters. Is Jersey supposed to be the second sister or should it be Kagami?}
{Did you know?} Yamashiro suddenly said. {I was supposed to have three sisters.}
She counted them off on her fingers. {One who would seek strength, one who would live for pride, and one who could read the tide of battle. Those were the three.}
Ayaka looked at her, a question percolating in her mind.
It must have showed on her face, because Yamashiro said, {I don't need to see the future to know what you're going to say next, that I only have one sister.}
{Yes.}
{There were supposed to be four of us. The Ise sisters were originally meant to have been part of our class.}
{Oh. If I'd heard, I forgot,} Ayaka said, embarrassed.
Yamashiro snorted. {Ise, Hyuuga and I were ordered as part of the same batch, unlike Nee-sama, but funding meant I was laid out before them.
{We were supposed to have been meant for great things. Ours was the first class of battleship with wholly-domestic production. Why, Nee-sama bears a name of our nation long before Yamato did, and I was briefly flagship of the whole Combined Fleet!}
Yamashiro's face darkened. {It was not meant to be. The ideals of our designs did not pan out and we were made out to be faulty battleships, the Ises revised so extensively that they were made their own class rather than being left as a subclass like Maya and Choukai or Ariake and Yuugure!}
She slashed her right arm out sharply enough that the sleeve made a crack like a lashing whip. This talk had evidently gotten her oil boiling; without a further word, she brushed past Ayaka and stormed away in that mechalupine manner Ayaka was getting a bit too familiar with.
Ayaka looked back in the direction of the offices and her unsubmitted report, then to where Yamashiro's form was disappearing down the corridor. Nakahara, she checked, wasn't in the vicinity, because of course it couldn't have been that easy. She could almost hear Yorktown's decrying the annoyance.
Casting another glance back at the offices, Ayaka grimaced and went after Yamashiro.
She was eventually found outdoors. The other shipgirl was standing outside the summoning building, staring at the entrance.
It was a warm and sunny day.
Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. The building, positioned at the edge of the clear blue water, afforded a good view of the Uraga Channel and the diminished but still-numerous ships entering and leaving Tokyo Bay. Horns split the air from time to time. On days like these, it was almost possible to believe there wasn't a war going on.
None of that seemed to do anything for the tension roiling beneath Yamashiro's outermost bulkheads, outwardly visible only by clenched fists, and those were obscured by the sleeves of her robes.
{I'm sorry,} Ayaka said as she walked up behind the Fusou.
{For what?} Yamashiro asked.
{Bringing up my sister's return and reminding you of your own situation.}
{What were you going to do, lie about why you got the summons? You who don't have a bad structural member in your hull?} Yamashiro snorted, incredulous. {It's not your fault. I know what the Gosei says, that to accept our flaws as they were without trying to better them would be to not have exerted all possible efforts and to be slothful, but it's not so easy to actually understand.}
{Would things really have been better if you had been kept as one family?} Ayaka thought the other shipgirl was giving her too much credit, but didn't say so aloud.
That brought Yamashiro up short. {Probably not,} she eventually said. {Our Admiralty had no problems splitting sisters up. Even without the unlucky number, we still had such misfortune. If we were four, might we have blown up mysteriously in port like Mutsu?}
Ayaka winced behind her back. {Maybe?} There was really no sensitive way of answering the question, not when it hit so close to home for herself.
Yamashiro turned to face her, hands relaxing. {I was expecting the worst when I heard that you would be in the escort force for the convoy. I was fully expecting some loud, underdressed bimbo here to lord over us as was her right.}
{Over here too?} Ayaka jumped in confusion and disbelief. {Why?}
{I may have been sunk already, but Nee-sama insisted I read the history books after coming back. You were Halsey's flagship for the surrender of this base all those years ago.}
Oh.
Ayaka remembered now, and it smothered her incipient hysteria like a fire blanket.
{It might have been your third sister our whole nation's surrender was actually signed on, and the second girl who kept him able to prosecute the war, but you were present when the surrender of my launchplace was effected, and being on that third launch day of yours the flagship of the man who once swore to take all our heads…}
{I guess I can see the symbolism in that,} Ayaka said in sombre agreement.
{Such misfortune.}
Ayaka didn't know what to say to that. How did you respond to the realisation that you were a symbol of a conqueror? The words had reminded her that Yamashiro had been built here, was memorialised not far away, and also that she had been hesitant to ask if there were any IJN men alive today who had been at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal's surrender all those years back. She wasn't sure how she would have taken the reverse, if it was a post-The Man in the High Castle world with a Kriegsmarine or IJN shipgirl coming to visit Americans she had played a direct part in the capitulation thereof.
Not well, probably.
{You don't actually have him in your fairies, do you?}
{Eh? Halsey-san?} Ayaka was pretty sure she would have noticed if the Bull was actually on board, and honestly doubted it - the man hadn't been on board for long, probably not long enough to leave a noetic imprint - but made to check her crew manifest nevertheless. {No, just a gestalt captain and admiral.}
{How strange… I know few of us have crew famous enough in that post that they created a clear clone of themselves, yet somehow I thought it was just me being unfortunate that Nishimura-sama's fairy is nowhere to be found.}
{Would it…}
{What?}
{Would it have been easier if he had?}
Yamashiro's mouth twitched and contorted as if she wanted to say something. {Probably not,} she eventually said after much visible struggle. {I let him down, after all.}
It wasn't just you, Ayaka felt like saying, but forced the strangely savage thought down, true though it was. Seven had entered and only one had walked away.
In hindsight, Ayaka wondered, was it really coincidence that the "Battle" of Surigao Strait happened 90 years to the day of the equally ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade?
Yamashiro shuffled to the water's edge and Ayaka followed. In daytime like this, there was no vivid multi-coloured skyline to be had, either from Yokohama or from Tokyo, but there was still something faintly magical about the vista.
{I thought I would hate and resent Wee Vee and the rest of Oldendorf's force more.} The younger Fusou had turned her back to the water, but she was looking through rather than at Ayaka. {Fear and loathe.}
{But?}
{I just… felt empty I guess. Disappointed with myself that I never got to fight back, go down swinging.} Yamashiro looked lost, head falling, and both her voice and stature seemed small. {If I had been able to leave a scratch, make one of them bleed, I could have lied to myself that I had managed to do something. You see how jovial Hiryuu-chan is around Yorktown despite their sordid past?}
Ayaka nodded in agreement.
{She landed what would have been, against anyone else, a mortal blow. And yet…} Yamashiro's forearms came up again, but there was only impotence in the closing of her hands this time. {Maybe a little scared, but more self-loathing than anything. Not---I don't actually feel burning, devouring anger though, no lust for revenge. Surigao was a shameful slaughter, yes, but Nishimura-sama would certainly have been as unsparing of Oldendorf had we been the ones ambushing with superior terrain, a prepared killzone, three-to-one advantage in capital ships and seven-to-one in escorts.}
{No, I don't imagine he would have held back. I don't know if the feeling is mutual, though.}
{How so?} Yamashiro asked quizzically as she looked back up, causing their red eyes to meet once more.
{Wee Vee seems to not care about the past. I think she said something like "What difference at this point does it make?"}
Yamashiro made a tsking sound. {No, of course she wouldn't. Glory is fleeting, but failure is forever.}
Shouldn't it be obscurity? Ayaka wondered.
{Every victor accepts his momentary success and quickly moves on, hungry for the next achievement.} Yamashiro turned once more to gaze on the not so distant Boso Peninsula on the other side of the channel. {What sears more the mind than a thousand regrets and wishes to correct a failing? The "if only"s, the "I should have"s and "could have"s?}
Behind her, Ayaka's mind drifted back to the 34-year old mystery of 47 lost souls. Happy ship, my ass, President Roosevelt.
Other Her made no response, not even the slightest hint of disapproval.
Later that night found Ayaka stargazing.
FLEACT Yokosuka didn't host its own Tanabata festivities, instead having interested parties proceed to Hiratsuka. The Shonan Hiratsuka Tanabata Festival, sometimes regarded as the largest celebration in the Kanto region, was a lively, raucous affair, set mainly around the Shonan Star Mall shopping street near the north exit of Hiratsuka Station. Hung-up tanzaku was everywhere, accompanied from above by divers gaily-coloured, intricately-patterned streamers and other decorations and talismans. A host of hawkers clamoured for the visitor yen, while games and contests drew a throng of onlookers. There were no visible scars of the damage the city had suffered 78 years ago.
After a final reminder, the dogs of war had been let slip, and both destroyers and the young-at-heart had disappeared into the crowd with haste.
Ayaka had hung back, wishing she still possessed that kind of childlike enthusiasm, and taken to walking through the stalls slowly. Even now, long past the point she had been deemed fit for discharge from the post-Fafnir therapy, there was always this background unease that accompanied her around these traditional Japanese festivities.
Her wandering had taken her down a quieter side street. The night was dry and cloudless, and she had a clear view of Vega and Altair, with Deneb's superlative brightness bridging the two. That said, it wasn't the same in the middle of a city, even an admittedly small one like this, not compared to how it had looked back in Imamura with no light pollution to obstruct the stars.
She knew the Sagami Bay coast was not far to the south. Barely a mile in fact. Had any of her company visited back then? Nothing was coming to mind.
Ayaka semiconsciously fingered a sleeve of the yukata she was wearing. It was blue with dull yellowish-grey four-petalled flowers and a red obi. The original had been destroyed along with her old home by Fafnir and she'd surprised everyone, not least herself, with her vehement insistence on having it remade. The obsession had been mysterious then.
It was positively ghoulish now that she knew there were kamisama alone knew how many of her for whom it had been an impromptu funerary outfit, and yet she somehow couldn't bear to banish it from her sight, much less outright destroy it.
"Corn pone?"
"Thanks, Augusta," Ayaka said, turning to carefully help herself to the tin the Northampton was offering.
"No problem, darlin'," CA-31 said as she daintily nibbled, her fine Southern accent betraying only the slightest hint of her long sojourns in Asian waters. She had large blue eyes and excellently-maintained auburn hair she wore loose down to the middle of her shoulder blades. She was wearing a green yukata with red peaches and other patterns rather than her usual long-sleeved, double-breasted blue blouse with its white wing collar, white pleated miniskirt, white leggings and red-trimmed green jacket. The geta she wore shared the same grey and red colouration as her pumps, though.
The heavy cruiser had been summoned back recently and was currently temporarily stationed at Yokosuka. If Ayaka recalled correctly, she was going to be transferred to Sasebo once there were enough shipgirls to stand up an amalgam and thus construct over there.
"Curious how Qixi changed after coming here, ain't it?"
"Un."
"So much else ain't the same." Augusta regarded her surroundings inquisitively. "I don't recognize nothing, not that my boys knew 'suka back then since we were mostly at 'hama. Wanted to go back to Shanghai, but the Pentagon won't let me. Even Atlanna don't behave like she ought."
How a proper Georgian sister had become a gaming-addled slovenly wastrel, exhuman - sorry, Natural Born was the polite term - or no, Augusta couldn't fathom. Such an unseemly misuse of computation devices.
Ayaka didn't respond.
Augusta turned and craned her neck to see her fellow presidential yacht staring unmovingly at the Summer Triangle, left arm outstretched as if trying to take the stars in hand, a distant, weary and, if she was reading it right, longing look on her face. "'owa?"
It was a strange sight, so very unlike a battleship, to look almost vulnerable. She'd seen destroyers with more swagger. Quite disconcerting.
Ayaka jerked and whirled on her, the arm dropping as she did so. "Sumima---sorry. I got distracted."
Augusta reined in the desire to chide her for such carelessness, which had brought up the unpleasant secondhand memories of Wilkes and Davilla or Hambleton and Ellyson's collisions. "Something the matter? You were staring at Zhinv and Niulang all worn slap out." Her pronunciation of the Chinese names was perfect, with no betraying drawl or twang. Nothing less was expected of a flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. "That Bongou get to you or something?" Entirely too much of a chatterbox, she was.
"No, it's just… due to our focus on weaving in our practices, Tanabata has always had an important position in the Shirokaze Shrine's calendar. To hear what my father once said, we were the de facto rulers of Imamura, which I guess made us all weaver princesses. Despite the years of service to Shitori no Kami, though, the idea of actually bearing that mantle never really sunk in until now."
Augusta reflexively winced at the careless use of "sunk". Natural Borns.
"I know that the Pacific is less than a speck of dust compared to the Milky Way, but the distance between here and home feels like a place further than the universe, one that all the tech in the world doesn't help much with."
To say nothing of a distance between Uileag and herself that had once been on a whole different plane from the merely spatial.
"That's a real hoot. Woulda thought you young'uns would have loved it that way. My kids would have wanted this kind of instant communication back then, rather than wait weeks for the postman."
"You would, wouldn't you?" Ayaka replied with a dry chuckle. "It's just not the same." She raised her right hand, palm up, to stare at it.
"You'll be going over yonder tomorrow, though, won't you?"
"That just adds anticipation in, building with every mile closer I get!" Ayaka exclaimed, before refocusing on Augusta. "Sorry. I mustn't be making sense. It must be hard to understand since you're used to being away from home for a long time."
"Oh, bless your heart," Augusta said atypically sharply. "Just 'cause I got used to it doesn't mean I don't miss home sometimes."
"Ah. Sorry." Ayaka wrung her hands.
"SecNav, I still don't dig this human love thing." Perhaps prompted by how the gesture unconsciously drew attention to Ayaka's ring, or maybe the just-raised legend of the star-crossed lovers, a frustrated blush coloured Augusta's cheeks, like she wasn't sure she ought to be saying such things aloud. "My boilers go funny when I think of CDR Frisk; the colours around me somehow become more vivid and everything sparkles so brightly. Is that love?"
"Love?" Ayaka coughed. CDR Graham Frisk was CAPT Zelben's XO and thus the next available officer in the chain of command. How things would change once the Sasebo construct was established wasn't something she didn't see the need to try divining.
"Darlin'?"
"Love?" Ayaka's eyes lit up and her face twisted into a hysterical grin.
Augusta stared nervously at the sudden change in demeanour.
"Love?!" Ayaka unreservedly broke into laughter like the Metal Storm of bubble guns, bent over slapping her knee.
Augusta was bewildered. Despite what she had been taught about being human, she couldn't suppress the deep-seated fear that if the battleship keeled over in this unsightly fit, there would be no helping her up, not with the whole more than five times the displacement.
"Love was the last thing I felt the first time I laid eyes on a certain fight-happy, stubborn idiot with no sense of propriety!" Ayaka paused laughing long enough to shout, but resumed right afterwards.
Still confused, Augusta patiently waited for Ayaka's laughter to run its course before asking, "Pray tell, what changed?"
"What changed? I…" Ayaka blinked owlishly, "don't know. No matter how many times I think it over, I can't find a clear turning point."
That the line had already been crossed that fateful morning she had cried seemingly apropos of nothing was obvious; where exactly the terminator between love being in bloom and its having yet to flower was, not so much.
"Speaking of stories unknown, did you ever hear the tale of Zirgzar?" Augusta said.
"The what?"
"I thought not. It's not a story History and Heritage Command would tell you. It's a legend at least one of my crew must have heard somewhere on our many travels, yet whose providence even I'm not sure of. When history witnesses a great change, Zirgzar reveals itself as a great hero. As it was about to finally slay its foe, however, it was ordered to stay its hand, and then it died to those it had fought for. Ironic."
"What happened to it?" There was something about this that unsettled Ayaka, something more than just the echoing quality overtaking the other shipgirl's voice in the recount, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
"However, after a period of slumber, Zirgzar returns, this time as a dark demon, using its power to rain death upon the land."
Ayaka stared at the other shipgirl with now-hooded eyes. "You think it has something to do with all of this? With… us?"
"It might. It might not. So many of the prophecies and tales Iteration's sifted through haven't been worth a hill of beans."
That, they hadn't, Ayaka conceded. Still, there was more one thing that was bothering her, and she had to give voice to it. "I'm surprised you're not saying anything about me and Uileag."
"Oh, please." Ayaka thought it was admirably almost Japanese how Augusta looked like she wanted to snort but that it would have been too crass of her to actually do so, settling for a palm-down dismissive waving of a hand. "Why, a lady does not comment about another's choice of dedicated recruitment station, or even that she wants to limit herself thusly, and especially not to that other's bridge."
Authors' Notes: The talk with Vestal will be flashed back to at an appropriate juncture. We haven't forgotten.
Since no one's cottoned on yet, let us say that these observations and visions Ayaka has been having regarding Naganami and Akagi are not just for fun. Your hint for this chapter: Let's see if anyone will recognise who they're meant to be.
Kongou cameo courtesy of Crusader Jerome from SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity. Original Augusta design and assistance with her portion from Dirtnap of the same. Our many thanks!
If anyone doesn't understand what we mean by the last paragraph, we'll spell it out explicitly once we get to the talk with Vestal, but here are some hints in the meantime:
1. The very reason Ayaka needed to speak with Vestal
2. What she just said to Augusta, a similar concern which was brought up both earlier in this segment and in the first segment of this chapter
3. What does a navy get from a recruitment station?
===[===]===
CHAPTER 21
===[===]===
July 7 2023
===[===]===
CHAPTER 21
===[===]===
July 7 2023
===[===]===
"LCDR Iowa to the communications room," The PA system announced. "LCDR Iowa to the communications room."
Seated in Uatu's section of the Fleet Activities Yokosuka office, Ayaka looked up from the report she had been checking prior to getting it submitted. It'd been a few weeks and run convoys since the wrecking of the Spratly Island abyssal bases, and earlier today they had returned from exercises with the Sasebo contingent.
Ugh.
Kongou.
To be fair to her, the Britain-built brunette battlecruiser - ahem, fast battleship - had had an underrated record of avoiding death from above the last time, and retained now a keen eye for the ways of air defence and evasion.
That did not make her any easier for Ayaka to stomach.
It wasn't just that the older warship's miko-derived outfit was even more deviant than Nakahara's, what with the non-standard skirt colours and black thighhigh boots. It was one thing to know intellectually that Shinto didn't have a unified doctrine to be a heretic against, no Izumo Inquisition to not expect. Treating the robes in this tacky-at-best fetish gear manner left a bad taste in her mouth, even if there were supposed to be links between the class' namesake mountains and Shinto that justified their being so garbed. As Yamashiro had previously noted, this was prurience for prurience's sake. Quite different from the now-defunct sexual communion rituals miko of centuries past had practised, ones that her lineage had never been party to at any rate. Even then, said miko would have been properly-attired before and after the act, not prancing around in a public state of undress. The rebellious her of 10 years ago probably wouldn't have given a damn, even with her grandmother's insistence, but actually being part of a miracle had a way of opening eyes.
It wasn't just the accent which had probably been Barrovian once but had been marinated long enough in the metaphorical mirin and miso to end up as some sort of tortured Frankenstein's creation that would have driven Ayaka's old English and Japanese teachers alike into a confused apoplexy.
The other shipgirl's initial congratulations on seeing her engagement ring had quickly turned to hysterical shock on learning that she was not, in fact, engaged to the next highest-ranking single male officer in the chain of command, given RDML Abel's obvious unsuitability and CAPT Zelben's being married.
"Why would you not want your admiral's Burning Love?!"
The pained empathetic wince on Akagi's face was a small reassurance that she fortunately wasn't alone in this. Kongou hadn't actually been the first Summoned/Manifested to mention it, just the most blatant.
Speaking of Akagi, there had always been something off about her that Ayaka couldn't put a finger on. Her motherly ways obviously extended to this old yet new family-in-arms; Ayaka had witnessed her telling bedtime stories to the younger shipgirls before. That made the nimbus-like half-tangible cloak of snow and cherry blossoms swirling around her, glimpsed only out of the corner of the eyes and always vanishing under scrutiny, all the more inexplicable.
What was she needed for, anyway? Ayaka couldn't figure out why she had been called. If it was Uatu matters, it should have gone through Yorktown.
It wasn't anything dire, was it? Ayaka wondered abruptly.
No, it shouldn't be either. No grim-looking gentlemen in dress uniform had approached her to express their regret to inform her.
Just to be sure, she tried divining and got a negative on both.
Why did she keep feeling, then, that there was some possibility she was missing?
She checked in at the front desk of the comms room and was directed to a booth. The yeoman logged her in to the secure terminal while she got seated before it and then took his leave, leaving her to wait for the connection to NAVSTA Everett to be established.
"Hello, Commander," the yeoman at the other end said in a deep, gravelly voice. "It is good to see you again. The Admiral has deemed you uniquely suited to have early access privilege to the news you are about to receive."
"Me? Why?"
"What I bring you now is not so much focused on what it is about, so much as who it is from. Behold." Without further ado, he stepped to the side.
Ayaka's heart… boilers? Skipped a beat.
"Salve, Grande Sorella."
{Persona 5 Original Soundtrack - The Days when My Mother was There}
The woman previously hidden behind the yeoman spoke Italian perfectly.
How shipgirl warbooks worked was another of those mysteries that continued to defy conventional explanation. No one knew for certain what a shipgirl would look like until she made her appearance, and despite valiant attempts by Jane's to extrapolate from the ships' physical characteristics and history, there had been misses. Ayaka was sailing proof of that.
Whatever the underlying mechanics, shipgirls did somehow know who each other were despite never having seen each other in human form before.
"Jer...sey?"
That didn't mean there was no surprise to be had.
New Jersey smiled brightly. "It's been a while." She had blue eyes and long blonde hair with the sidelocks carefully curled into drill ringlets, topped with a tiara. There was a hint of noble aquiline cast to her features. Even speaking English there was still a slight hint of Italian to the self-assured Joisey but old money smooth accent in her voice, enough to be exotically alluring without distorting the words into an indecipherable mess.
"We will leave you to your reunion with your recently-returned sister, Commander," the yeoman said, and promptly took his leave.
After the door shut behind him, Ayaka's gaze panned down and she immediately felt her cheeks start to burn.
Due to first university and then work, Ayaka had never really had much chance to see Kagami through her teenage years. Ichiyo had reassured her, though, that the younger Godai/Shirokaze hadn't started dressing trashily, returning home at unearthly hours stinking of alcohol, playing boyfriend hopscotch or otherwise exhibiting the signs of teenage rebellion.
Why was this relevant?
The dark sailor collar of Jersey's blue dress was easily missed against how its neckline went down and down and down some more. It went right past a silver anchor necklace, breasts unsupported by a bra, was briefly obstructed by a Miss USA pageant sash, and finally terminated at a pinstriped waist sash.
"Yes, too long," Ayaka replied, fighting not to openly display the anger and embarrassment of an older sister confronted with a shameless sibling. It was an unfamiliar feeling.
Was this how West Virginia felt most of the time?
"You look well. Better than expected, even."
"Better than expected? What were you expecting?"
The word had reminded Ayaka of that conversation with Mina already a month back, but before she could think on that, the first meeting with Quincy floated to the surface of her mind.
"Blonde…blue-eyed…too little to wear…"
Ayaka couldn't see any stars in her younger sister's eyes, but that was three marks on the checklist already.
QUINCY!!! She screamed internally.
There was a whiplash-inducingly sudden thinness to Jersey's smile. "We never got to say goodbye after what happened 30 years ago, not that we were truly aware of what was going on then."
Searing heat.
Choking smoke.
The smell of gunpowder and charred flesh.
Mangled metal and meat.
"No, we wouldn't have been," Ayaka replied, her thoughts derailed. This wasn't quite what she had been fearing when the talk about expectation had come up.
She was still confused by these patchwork memories of her past life, fuzzy, incomplete, imperfectly composited from data, logs, what had been somehow left by her crew and who knows where else.
"Number Two is functional now?"
"Yes, he is."
"Good." Jersey's smile now put Ayaka in mind of Mona Lisa as a Mafioso, and reminded her that for all the second Iowa looked like some spindly socialite too eager to flaunt her figure, she was still very much a war machine incarnate, the most decorated American battleship. "It was a travesty how you were left in limbo for so long."
"Jersey… you should know that though I vaguely remember 6 years of slumber, I can't say for sure when exactly I stopped being the me you knew. Was it after my third decommissioning in 1990? After we were struck from the register the first time in 1995? Sometime else? I don't know."
"It doesn't matter to me that your present life started in a womb rather than a shipyard," Jersey said firmly as she rested her forearms on the desk before her. They were clad in blue opera gloves with white stripes near the top under Navy patches, a dark blue band at the wrists and a white star on the back of the left hand. Strangely, they were fingerless except for the third and fourth fingers. "We were from different shipyards the last time and that didn't change anything. It still doesn't change anything that I came back in response to a summoning. You're still my big sister."
Ayaka felt like there was something in her eyes. "Thank you."
"At least you weren't left vegetative for the years it took to decide what to do with you. In fact, it's better this way."
Ayaka stared. "I… don't understand."
"Giving you a lifetime's buffer, that the explosion isn't the last thing you remember happening on your return, appears to have been for the best."
Do I really look like I have it all together? Ayaka silently wondered, trying to keep a frown off her face. She understood now what Jersey was driving at, but Mina showed some things stayed the same across lives, and this life of hers had put her through things she would have wished on naught but her worst enemies.
She didn't say anything aloud, though. This joyous occasion was not one to disabuse Jersey of her notions.
"That said, I wonder if anything will change after our old hulls are reactivated."
"I don't know." The steel hull was always somewhere at the back of Ayaka's mind, being part of her supernal anchors as it were, but as a distant thing she didn't really give much active thought in the day-to-day. Commanding aviators was like in a RTS, where one was always at a remove, visual input viewed like through a screen, and while Ayaka had lived being transplanted wholesale into another's body before, she couldn't imagine what existing in more than one place simultaneously would be like, nevermind in such a vastly different form factor.
"On second thought, it doesn't matter. I doubt we will need to take control of our old selves." Jersey flicked her long locks in a diva-like grandiose gesture. "What is this I hear about you being engaged to a non-flag officer?"
Ayaka's brain froze for a moment, and not due to any deliberate willwork.
"JERSEY!"
===[===]===
Jersey eventually had to go, and so they had hung up.
Ayaka had her own work to get back to, as things stood.
She still wasn't quite sure what to think. She was supposed to be overjoyed that her sister was back, right? A Summoned/Manifested Iowa would have been, wouldn't she? Why didn't she feel appropriately, overwhelmingly jubilant, then? Was it merely due to this reunion being at the remove of a video call, or was it because there was a disconnect between her previous life and this one?
Maybe she was just getting old. 10 years ago, the mere prospect of patronising a cafe would have gotten her sparkling with joy.
{Is that… Iowa-san?} A familiar voice asked, surprised, in Japanese as she was walking away from the communications room.
{Eh?} Ayaka turned. {Oh! Yamashiro-san.}
{Did something happen?} The other shipgirl slowly lowered her raised left hand.
{Everett wanted to speak with me. They summoned the… the first of my sisters.}
{Oh. Congratulations.}
{Thank you.}
Yamashiro sounded half-hearted, but then again she always did; Ayaka couldn't hold it against her. {One less thing to wish for Tanabata; it must be nice.}
One of the main customs of Tanabata was the writing of wishes on small strips of paper called tanzaku, which would then be hung on bamboo branches.
{You think so? I've never given much thought before to seniority between my blood and ship sisters. Is Jersey supposed to be the second sister or should it be Kagami?}
{Did you know?} Yamashiro suddenly said. {I was supposed to have three sisters.}
{Ace Combat Zero Original Soundtrack - Briefing III}
She counted them off on her fingers. {One who would seek strength, one who would live for pride, and one who could read the tide of battle. Those were the three.}
Ayaka looked at her, a question percolating in her mind.
It must have showed on her face, because Yamashiro said, {I don't need to see the future to know what you're going to say next, that I only have one sister.}
{Yes.}
{There were supposed to be four of us. The Ise sisters were originally meant to have been part of our class.}
{Oh. If I'd heard, I forgot,} Ayaka said, embarrassed.
Yamashiro snorted. {Ise, Hyuuga and I were ordered as part of the same batch, unlike Nee-sama, but funding meant I was laid out before them.
{We were supposed to have been meant for great things. Ours was the first class of battleship with wholly-domestic production. Why, Nee-sama bears a name of our nation long before Yamato did, and I was briefly flagship of the whole Combined Fleet!}
Yamashiro's face darkened. {It was not meant to be. The ideals of our designs did not pan out and we were made out to be faulty battleships, the Ises revised so extensively that they were made their own class rather than being left as a subclass like Maya and Choukai or Ariake and Yuugure!}
She slashed her right arm out sharply enough that the sleeve made a crack like a lashing whip. This talk had evidently gotten her oil boiling; without a further word, she brushed past Ayaka and stormed away in that mechalupine manner Ayaka was getting a bit too familiar with.
Ayaka looked back in the direction of the offices and her unsubmitted report, then to where Yamashiro's form was disappearing down the corridor. Nakahara, she checked, wasn't in the vicinity, because of course it couldn't have been that easy. She could almost hear Yorktown's decrying the annoyance.
Casting another glance back at the offices, Ayaka grimaced and went after Yamashiro.
She was eventually found outdoors. The other shipgirl was standing outside the summoning building, staring at the entrance.
It was a warm and sunny day.
Birds were singing. Flowers were blooming. The building, positioned at the edge of the clear blue water, afforded a good view of the Uraga Channel and the diminished but still-numerous ships entering and leaving Tokyo Bay. Horns split the air from time to time. On days like these, it was almost possible to believe there wasn't a war going on.
None of that seemed to do anything for the tension roiling beneath Yamashiro's outermost bulkheads, outwardly visible only by clenched fists, and those were obscured by the sleeves of her robes.
{I'm sorry,} Ayaka said as she walked up behind the Fusou.
{For what?} Yamashiro asked.
{Bringing up my sister's return and reminding you of your own situation.}
{What were you going to do, lie about why you got the summons? You who don't have a bad structural member in your hull?} Yamashiro snorted, incredulous. {It's not your fault. I know what the Gosei says, that to accept our flaws as they were without trying to better them would be to not have exerted all possible efforts and to be slothful, but it's not so easy to actually understand.}
{Would things really have been better if you had been kept as one family?} Ayaka thought the other shipgirl was giving her too much credit, but didn't say so aloud.
That brought Yamashiro up short. {Probably not,} she eventually said. {Our Admiralty had no problems splitting sisters up. Even without the unlucky number, we still had such misfortune. If we were four, might we have blown up mysteriously in port like Mutsu?}
Ayaka winced behind her back. {Maybe?} There was really no sensitive way of answering the question, not when it hit so close to home for herself.
Yamashiro turned to face her, hands relaxing. {I was expecting the worst when I heard that you would be in the escort force for the convoy. I was fully expecting some loud, underdressed bimbo here to lord over us as was her right.}
{Over here too?} Ayaka jumped in confusion and disbelief. {Why?}
{I may have been sunk already, but Nee-sama insisted I read the history books after coming back. You were Halsey's flagship for the surrender of this base all those years ago.}
Oh.
Ayaka remembered now, and it smothered her incipient hysteria like a fire blanket.
{It might have been your third sister our whole nation's surrender was actually signed on, and the second girl who kept him able to prosecute the war, but you were present when the surrender of my launchplace was effected, and being on that third launch day of yours the flagship of the man who once swore to take all our heads…}
{I guess I can see the symbolism in that,} Ayaka said in sombre agreement.
{Such misfortune.}
Ayaka didn't know what to say to that. How did you respond to the realisation that you were a symbol of a conqueror? The words had reminded her that Yamashiro had been built here, was memorialised not far away, and also that she had been hesitant to ask if there were any IJN men alive today who had been at Yokosuka Naval Arsenal's surrender all those years back. She wasn't sure how she would have taken the reverse, if it was a post-The Man in the High Castle world with a Kriegsmarine or IJN shipgirl coming to visit Americans she had played a direct part in the capitulation thereof.
Not well, probably.
{You don't actually have him in your fairies, do you?}
{Eh? Halsey-san?} Ayaka was pretty sure she would have noticed if the Bull was actually on board, and honestly doubted it - the man hadn't been on board for long, probably not long enough to leave a noetic imprint - but made to check her crew manifest nevertheless. {No, just a gestalt captain and admiral.}
{How strange… I know few of us have crew famous enough in that post that they created a clear clone of themselves, yet somehow I thought it was just me being unfortunate that Nishimura-sama's fairy is nowhere to be found.}
{Would it…}
{What?}
{Would it have been easier if he had?}
Yamashiro's mouth twitched and contorted as if she wanted to say something. {Probably not,} she eventually said after much visible struggle. {I let him down, after all.}
It wasn't just you, Ayaka felt like saying, but forced the strangely savage thought down, true though it was. Seven had entered and only one had walked away.
In hindsight, Ayaka wondered, was it really coincidence that the "Battle" of Surigao Strait happened 90 years to the day of the equally ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade?
Yamashiro shuffled to the water's edge and Ayaka followed. In daytime like this, there was no vivid multi-coloured skyline to be had, either from Yokohama or from Tokyo, but there was still something faintly magical about the vista.
{I thought I would hate and resent Wee Vee and the rest of Oldendorf's force more.} The younger Fusou had turned her back to the water, but she was looking through rather than at Ayaka. {Fear and loathe.}
{But?}
{I just… felt empty I guess. Disappointed with myself that I never got to fight back, go down swinging.} Yamashiro looked lost, head falling, and both her voice and stature seemed small. {If I had been able to leave a scratch, make one of them bleed, I could have lied to myself that I had managed to do something. You see how jovial Hiryuu-chan is around Yorktown despite their sordid past?}
Ayaka nodded in agreement.
{She landed what would have been, against anyone else, a mortal blow. And yet…} Yamashiro's forearms came up again, but there was only impotence in the closing of her hands this time. {Maybe a little scared, but more self-loathing than anything. Not---I don't actually feel burning, devouring anger though, no lust for revenge. Surigao was a shameful slaughter, yes, but Nishimura-sama would certainly have been as unsparing of Oldendorf had we been the ones ambushing with superior terrain, a prepared killzone, three-to-one advantage in capital ships and seven-to-one in escorts.}
{No, I don't imagine he would have held back. I don't know if the feeling is mutual, though.}
{How so?} Yamashiro asked quizzically as she looked back up, causing their red eyes to meet once more.
{Wee Vee seems to not care about the past. I think she said something like "What difference at this point does it make?"}
Yamashiro made a tsking sound. {No, of course she wouldn't. Glory is fleeting, but failure is forever.}
Shouldn't it be obscurity? Ayaka wondered.
{Every victor accepts his momentary success and quickly moves on, hungry for the next achievement.} Yamashiro turned once more to gaze on the not so distant Boso Peninsula on the other side of the channel. {What sears more the mind than a thousand regrets and wishes to correct a failing? The "if only"s, the "I should have"s and "could have"s?}
Behind her, Ayaka's mind drifted back to the 34-year old mystery of 47 lost souls. Happy ship, my ass, President Roosevelt.
Other Her made no response, not even the slightest hint of disapproval.
===[===]===
Later that night found Ayaka stargazing.
FLEACT Yokosuka didn't host its own Tanabata festivities, instead having interested parties proceed to Hiratsuka. The Shonan Hiratsuka Tanabata Festival, sometimes regarded as the largest celebration in the Kanto region, was a lively, raucous affair, set mainly around the Shonan Star Mall shopping street near the north exit of Hiratsuka Station. Hung-up tanzaku was everywhere, accompanied from above by divers gaily-coloured, intricately-patterned streamers and other decorations and talismans. A host of hawkers clamoured for the visitor yen, while games and contests drew a throng of onlookers. There were no visible scars of the damage the city had suffered 78 years ago.
After a final reminder, the dogs of war had been let slip, and both destroyers and the young-at-heart had disappeared into the crowd with haste.
Ayaka had hung back, wishing she still possessed that kind of childlike enthusiasm, and taken to walking through the stalls slowly. Even now, long past the point she had been deemed fit for discharge from the post-Fafnir therapy, there was always this background unease that accompanied her around these traditional Japanese festivities.
Her wandering had taken her down a quieter side street. The night was dry and cloudless, and she had a clear view of Vega and Altair, with Deneb's superlative brightness bridging the two. That said, it wasn't the same in the middle of a city, even an admittedly small one like this, not compared to how it had looked back in Imamura with no light pollution to obstruct the stars.
She knew the Sagami Bay coast was not far to the south. Barely a mile in fact. Had any of her company visited back then? Nothing was coming to mind.
Ayaka semiconsciously fingered a sleeve of the yukata she was wearing. It was blue with dull yellowish-grey four-petalled flowers and a red obi. The original had been destroyed along with her old home by Fafnir and she'd surprised everyone, not least herself, with her vehement insistence on having it remade. The obsession had been mysterious then.
It was positively ghoulish now that she knew there were kamisama alone knew how many of her for whom it had been an impromptu funerary outfit, and yet she somehow couldn't bear to banish it from her sight, much less outright destroy it.
"Corn pone?"
{Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War Original Soundtrack - White Noise}
"Thanks, Augusta," Ayaka said, turning to carefully help herself to the tin the Northampton was offering.
"No problem, darlin'," CA-31 said as she daintily nibbled, her fine Southern accent betraying only the slightest hint of her long sojourns in Asian waters. She had large blue eyes and excellently-maintained auburn hair she wore loose down to the middle of her shoulder blades. She was wearing a green yukata with red peaches and other patterns rather than her usual long-sleeved, double-breasted blue blouse with its white wing collar, white pleated miniskirt, white leggings and red-trimmed green jacket. The geta she wore shared the same grey and red colouration as her pumps, though.
The heavy cruiser had been summoned back recently and was currently temporarily stationed at Yokosuka. If Ayaka recalled correctly, she was going to be transferred to Sasebo once there were enough shipgirls to stand up an amalgam and thus construct over there.
"Curious how Qixi changed after coming here, ain't it?"
"Un."
"So much else ain't the same." Augusta regarded her surroundings inquisitively. "I don't recognize nothing, not that my boys knew 'suka back then since we were mostly at 'hama. Wanted to go back to Shanghai, but the Pentagon won't let me. Even Atlanna don't behave like she ought."
How a proper Georgian sister had become a gaming-addled slovenly wastrel, exhuman - sorry, Natural Born was the polite term - or no, Augusta couldn't fathom. Such an unseemly misuse of computation devices.
Ayaka didn't respond.
Augusta turned and craned her neck to see her fellow presidential yacht staring unmovingly at the Summer Triangle, left arm outstretched as if trying to take the stars in hand, a distant, weary and, if she was reading it right, longing look on her face. "'owa?"
It was a strange sight, so very unlike a battleship, to look almost vulnerable. She'd seen destroyers with more swagger. Quite disconcerting.
Ayaka jerked and whirled on her, the arm dropping as she did so. "Sumima---sorry. I got distracted."
Augusta reined in the desire to chide her for such carelessness, which had brought up the unpleasant secondhand memories of Wilkes and Davilla or Hambleton and Ellyson's collisions. "Something the matter? You were staring at Zhinv and Niulang all worn slap out." Her pronunciation of the Chinese names was perfect, with no betraying drawl or twang. Nothing less was expected of a flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. "That Bongou get to you or something?" Entirely too much of a chatterbox, she was.
"No, it's just… due to our focus on weaving in our practices, Tanabata has always had an important position in the Shirokaze Shrine's calendar. To hear what my father once said, we were the de facto rulers of Imamura, which I guess made us all weaver princesses. Despite the years of service to Shitori no Kami, though, the idea of actually bearing that mantle never really sunk in until now."
Augusta reflexively winced at the careless use of "sunk". Natural Borns.
"I know that the Pacific is less than a speck of dust compared to the Milky Way, but the distance between here and home feels like a place further than the universe, one that all the tech in the world doesn't help much with."
To say nothing of a distance between Uileag and herself that had once been on a whole different plane from the merely spatial.
"That's a real hoot. Woulda thought you young'uns would have loved it that way. My kids would have wanted this kind of instant communication back then, rather than wait weeks for the postman."
"You would, wouldn't you?" Ayaka replied with a dry chuckle. "It's just not the same." She raised her right hand, palm up, to stare at it.
"You'll be going over yonder tomorrow, though, won't you?"
"That just adds anticipation in, building with every mile closer I get!" Ayaka exclaimed, before refocusing on Augusta. "Sorry. I mustn't be making sense. It must be hard to understand since you're used to being away from home for a long time."
"Oh, bless your heart," Augusta said atypically sharply. "Just 'cause I got used to it doesn't mean I don't miss home sometimes."
"Ah. Sorry." Ayaka wrung her hands.
"SecNav, I still don't dig this human love thing." Perhaps prompted by how the gesture unconsciously drew attention to Ayaka's ring, or maybe the just-raised legend of the star-crossed lovers, a frustrated blush coloured Augusta's cheeks, like she wasn't sure she ought to be saying such things aloud. "My boilers go funny when I think of CDR Frisk; the colours around me somehow become more vivid and everything sparkles so brightly. Is that love?"
"Love?" Ayaka coughed. CDR Graham Frisk was CAPT Zelben's XO and thus the next available officer in the chain of command. How things would change once the Sasebo construct was established wasn't something she didn't see the need to try divining.
"Darlin'?"
"Love?" Ayaka's eyes lit up and her face twisted into a hysterical grin.
Augusta stared nervously at the sudden change in demeanour.
"Love?!" Ayaka unreservedly broke into laughter like the Metal Storm of bubble guns, bent over slapping her knee.
Augusta was bewildered. Despite what she had been taught about being human, she couldn't suppress the deep-seated fear that if the battleship keeled over in this unsightly fit, there would be no helping her up, not with the whole more than five times the displacement.
"Love was the last thing I felt the first time I laid eyes on a certain fight-happy, stubborn idiot with no sense of propriety!" Ayaka paused laughing long enough to shout, but resumed right afterwards.
Still confused, Augusta patiently waited for Ayaka's laughter to run its course before asking, "Pray tell, what changed?"
"What changed? I…" Ayaka blinked owlishly, "don't know. No matter how many times I think it over, I can't find a clear turning point."
That the line had already been crossed that fateful morning she had cried seemingly apropos of nothing was obvious; where exactly the terminator between love being in bloom and its having yet to flower was, not so much.
"Speaking of stories unknown, did you ever hear the tale of Zirgzar?" Augusta said.
"The what?"
"I thought not. It's not a story History and Heritage Command would tell you. It's a legend at least one of my crew must have heard somewhere on our many travels, yet whose providence even I'm not sure of. When history witnesses a great change, Zirgzar reveals itself as a great hero. As it was about to finally slay its foe, however, it was ordered to stay its hand, and then it died to those it had fought for. Ironic."
"What happened to it?" There was something about this that unsettled Ayaka, something more than just the echoing quality overtaking the other shipgirl's voice in the recount, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
"However, after a period of slumber, Zirgzar returns, this time as a dark demon, using its power to rain death upon the land."
Ayaka stared at the other shipgirl with now-hooded eyes. "You think it has something to do with all of this? With… us?"
"It might. It might not. So many of the prophecies and tales Iteration's sifted through haven't been worth a hill of beans."
That, they hadn't, Ayaka conceded. Still, there was more one thing that was bothering her, and she had to give voice to it. "I'm surprised you're not saying anything about me and Uileag."
"Oh, please." Ayaka thought it was admirably almost Japanese how Augusta looked like she wanted to snort but that it would have been too crass of her to actually do so, settling for a palm-down dismissive waving of a hand. "Why, a lady does not comment about another's choice of dedicated recruitment station, or even that she wants to limit herself thusly, and especially not to that other's bridge."
===[===]===
Authors' Notes: The talk with Vestal will be flashed back to at an appropriate juncture. We haven't forgotten.
Since no one's cottoned on yet, let us say that these observations and visions Ayaka has been having regarding Naganami and Akagi are not just for fun. Your hint for this chapter: Let's see if anyone will recognise who they're meant to be.
Kongou cameo courtesy of Crusader Jerome from SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity. Original Augusta design and assistance with her portion from Dirtnap of the same. Our many thanks!
If anyone doesn't understand what we mean by the last paragraph, we'll spell it out explicitly once we get to the talk with Vestal, but here are some hints in the meantime:
1. The very reason Ayaka needed to speak with Vestal
2. What she just said to Augusta, a similar concern which was brought up both earlier in this segment and in the first segment of this chapter
3. What does a navy get from a recruitment station?
Last edited:
- Location
- Somewhere
"Diverse," perhaps?
I think there's a word missing there, not sure.
In any case, great work! The shift in "focus" from Ayaka to Augusta in the middle was a bit jarring, but as a whole it reads quite nicely.
On word choices in CH21
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
No, it's intentional. Somewhat old-fashioned, but intentional.
No, that's intentional too. It's supposed to be read as "It was positively ghoulish now that she knew there were kamisama alone knew how many {alternate Mitsuha/Ayakas} for whom it had been an impromptu funerary outfit". KnNW is built on an alternate timeline formed by Taki and Mitsuha's salvation of Itomori, and alternate realities/timelines/universes are alluded to canonically by Tessie's talk about the Everett multiverse theory and in here by Futaba/Nijimi.
It was supposed to be deliberately bouncing between the two of them. Do you have any suggestions on making it smoother?
In any case, welcome on board, and we hope you'll stay the course to the end!
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
In the absence of any further comments, the finalised Chapter 21 will be going up later today.
In the meantime:
"5 minutes, Ma'am!"
"Thank you, Lieutenant," RDML Abel replied as she finished double-checking her appearance and attire, making sure there was no hair out of place, no loose thread dangling from her dress whites, no misaligned or misplaced medal.
So many, she thought grimly, won in blood even before the ravagers of present had fallen onto mankind, and far too much of that from comrades who had not lived to celebrate them with her. Oh, she'd paid her dues - the Purple Heart was unimpeachable proof of that - but it was hardly fair recompense.
She stared at the face in the mirror. She'd never been a looker, and age hadn't done much to soften the harsh angles that were at least partly to blame for her callsign. Neither had the hypermedications with their anagathic effects, even if she didn't miss the back problems and other ailments of senescence that had been starting to take their toll.
After checking there was nothing else to secure, she exited her office.
LT Stephanie Saw was waiting outside. Dark of hair and eye, she immediately cast a critical eye over her boss' attire even as the superior officer in question locked the doors. She evidently had taken to heart Abel's admonishment that an admiral had to maintain the highest standards in all things and thus set the right example for all.
"Satisfactory?" Abel asked.
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Good." Abel fell in behind her as they briskly headed for the summoning chamber in use this evening.
The summoning chamber was similar to the one at Yokosuka. Located in a building near the water, a channel led from the sea to a pool in the middle of the chamber, secured with a gate when not in use. There was a slope into the pool made to resemble a slipway and ensigns hung from the safety rails surrounding it. A stained glass rendition of Corne's famous painting of Constitution battling Guerriere occupied pride of place on one of the chamber's walls. Plaques and prints of other famous paintings and portraits occurred the rest of the wall space.
Abel couldn't explain the skin-crawling unease she felt when looking on the portrait of Halsey.
A ship's bell was mounted at the far end of the chamber where all present could see it, the parade commander waiting patiently by it as he faced the crowd of sailors, marines and Iteration and BERND personnel selected for the evening's summoning session. Old Glory was mounted on the wall next to him, and he was careful to not obstruct it. There was a band on the other side of the channel, instruments at the ready.
Most of the materials for the summoning ceremony were already in place in the pool, stored in their respective containers. Today was a Large Day, with a correspondingly generous offering:
4,000 litres of fuel oil.
6,000 kilograms of empty 5in shells.
6,000 kilograms of Special Treatment Steel.
3,000 kilograms of bauxite.
Instead of going through the large industrial doors the main audience contingent had entered via, sized for the forklifts needed to move all this, Saw and Abel headed up to the second level and went through the doors there. They led to an elevated gallery that the day's rotation of senior personnel representing Everett's conventional units and their aides were waiting in, as well as the catwalk extending out over the water.
Abel did a quick visual inspection of the chamber, then nodded to Saw, who in turn signaled to the parade commander.
"Attention!"
The lights deliberately switched over to the red of emergency conditions, and all present went to attention as the band struck up the Star-Spangled Banner, followed by Anchors Aweigh.
After the songs finished, Abel turned to Saw, who had produced a Purple Heart, and accepted it with both hands. Holding it firmly yet carefully, she marched down the catwalk. No matter how many times she had done this, it was always accompanied in the back of her mind by the feeling of walking the plank, not that she let anything show on her impassive admiral's face.
Once she reached the edge, she very deliberately took a deep breath to centre her mind before bending to cast the Purple Heart into the water with the same reverence as that accorded to a burial at sea.
It hit the water with a weighty plop and descended to join the rest of the offerings.
Now Abel smoothly drew her dress sword and saluted with it, holding the salute for seven seconds before lowering her arm. The sword came up in another seven-second salute, following which she clapped its pommel twice before lowering it once more.
Fixing her eyes firmly on the horizon, Abel began to deliver the speech of summoning with the full gravity it deserved.
"Fourscore and two years ago, on a date which lives in infamy, our fathers were suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces. Today, our nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is once more engaged in a great war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can longer endure.
"It will be recorded that the level of coordination exhibited by the enemy unknown makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned.
"The attack on all American property has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. It has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
"The enemy administration also launched an attack against Singapore. Enemy forces attacked China. Enemy forces attacked Guam. Enemy forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Enemy forces attacked Britain and Europe. Enemy forces attacked divers nations regardless of their position on us. I regret to tell you that very many have been lost.
"They have therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the whole world. The facts of the past months speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety, not just of our Nation, but of all humanity.
"Always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. This terror from the deep has erected a multitude, and sent hither swarms to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
"It seeks to cut off our Trade with all parts of the world:
"It is at this time transporting large Armies to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy a civilized nation.
"It has constrained all men under threat or actual deprivation of the self-evident truths and unalienable Rights endowed by their Creator, among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, to bear Arms against other Countries, to become the executioners of their fellows and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Not once has an attempt been made to offer peace, where most other peoples have been offered Faust's bargain, though not have We been wanting in attentions to this foe.
"We know we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—these waters. Not we, who have broken faith with our fathers and their oath that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
"Not we, the living, who find our righteous might, our confidence in our armed forces and the unbound determination of our people sorely tested by this premeditated invasion, that triumph hardly appear inevitable, the winning through to absolute victory remain in doubt, so help us God.
"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
"Today find ourselves with no further recourse. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled on great battle-fields of war old, defending us to the uttermost, have consecrated far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say, but it can never forget what they did. Thus it is with the greatest shame that the final resting-places for those who gave their lives, that that nation might live, we must disturb once more. The unfinished work which they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced, we must summon again the original artisans to finish. Us who here are dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—humbly admit that the imminent apocalypse is beyond the meagre ability of our interceptors and enforcers to cancel.
"We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, having solemnly sworn to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People, solemnly beseech once more the fallen to launch a second time, that with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Abel now sheathed her sword, signifying the completion of the speech. Following this, on the ground floor, an honour guard marched up to the pool carrying a powder bag and delicately lowered it in.
Once they had returned to their original positions, Abel drew her sword once again, this time holding it out over the chasm such that it was parallel to the ground before her, blade facing up and tip pointing right. Carefully removing her right glove, she shaped her fingers into a V and passed her hand over but not touching the blade, a vertical inversion of the gesture shipgirls used to enact the lunge rote. Once her hand was at the tip, she slowly, deliberately pressed her little finger to the sharp edge until the skin was broken.
This offering of blood, freshly shed by an officer of at least O-5 rank, was required to seal the summoning contract.
"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes, and by the opening of my pinky, called back will be something heavenly."
So it was written.
Abel's face did not waver as blood welled up from the cut. This was nothing.
So very nothing.
One drop, falling into the water with the gathered materials waiting to be offered, so little in comparison to the great volumes it joined, yet like a thunderclap in the silence.
Two drops.
A third drop.
The water suddenly started bubbling, gently at first, and then steadily growing in vigour with every additional drop.
Four drops.
Five.
Six.
At the seventh, the water began to shimmer with light of unclear providence, a pulsing gold alternating mesmerisingly with purple and orange like the twilight sky outside. The materials under the water began to disintegrate, fading from sight, even the oil that leaked from the compromised barrels disappearing from the water without a trace.
Without showing any outward sign of concern over her finger, Abel raised her sword in salute one more time, then marched back to the viewing gallery, where she accepted a cloth from Saw to wipe off the sword and press to the cut.
Another cue, and the band played Eternal Father, Strong to Save.
Eventually, the hymn finished, and so too had the water stopped bubbling as the last of the materials disappeared, leaving only clear water down to the bottom of the pool.
Saw gave the signal, and the parade commander stood the contingent down to parade rest as they made ready to wait. It had been learnt over many sessions that shipgirls answered the summons on their own schedule. Not an easy lesson for old aviators like Abel, drilled in by training and honed to a keen edge by combat as to how a split second possibly meant the difference between life and death. Years flying a desk - or a flag bridge for that matter - hadn't taught much patience. That said, after an hour, the contingent would be dismissed. After nearly half a year of summoning attempts, successful and otherwise, there were enough data points as to demonstrate with a high degree of confidence that no one bothered showing up later than that.
In the distance, the rays from the setting sun formed a diffraction spike.
In the meantime:
===[===]===
CHAPTER 22
===[===]===
A few days later
Amalgam 55 "Uatu" en route from FLEACT Yokosuka to NAVSTA Everett
===[===]===
CHAPTER 22
===[===]===
A few days later
Amalgam 55 "Uatu" en route from FLEACT Yokosuka to NAVSTA Everett
===[===]===
"5 minutes, Ma'am!"
"Thank you, Lieutenant," RDML Abel replied as she finished double-checking her appearance and attire, making sure there was no hair out of place, no loose thread dangling from her dress whites, no misaligned or misplaced medal.
So many, she thought grimly, won in blood even before the ravagers of present had fallen onto mankind, and far too much of that from comrades who had not lived to celebrate them with her. Oh, she'd paid her dues - the Purple Heart was unimpeachable proof of that - but it was hardly fair recompense.
She stared at the face in the mirror. She'd never been a looker, and age hadn't done much to soften the harsh angles that were at least partly to blame for her callsign. Neither had the hypermedications with their anagathic effects, even if she didn't miss the back problems and other ailments of senescence that had been starting to take their toll.
After checking there was nothing else to secure, she exited her office.
LT Stephanie Saw was waiting outside. Dark of hair and eye, she immediately cast a critical eye over her boss' attire even as the superior officer in question locked the doors. She evidently had taken to heart Abel's admonishment that an admiral had to maintain the highest standards in all things and thus set the right example for all.
"Satisfactory?" Abel asked.
"Yes, Ma'am."
"Good." Abel fell in behind her as they briskly headed for the summoning chamber in use this evening.
The summoning chamber was similar to the one at Yokosuka. Located in a building near the water, a channel led from the sea to a pool in the middle of the chamber, secured with a gate when not in use. There was a slope into the pool made to resemble a slipway and ensigns hung from the safety rails surrounding it. A stained glass rendition of Corne's famous painting of Constitution battling Guerriere occupied pride of place on one of the chamber's walls. Plaques and prints of other famous paintings and portraits occurred the rest of the wall space.
Abel couldn't explain the skin-crawling unease she felt when looking on the portrait of Halsey.
A ship's bell was mounted at the far end of the chamber where all present could see it, the parade commander waiting patiently by it as he faced the crowd of sailors, marines and Iteration and BERND personnel selected for the evening's summoning session. Old Glory was mounted on the wall next to him, and he was careful to not obstruct it. There was a band on the other side of the channel, instruments at the ready.
Most of the materials for the summoning ceremony were already in place in the pool, stored in their respective containers. Today was a Large Day, with a correspondingly generous offering:
4,000 litres of fuel oil.
6,000 kilograms of empty 5in shells.
6,000 kilograms of Special Treatment Steel.
3,000 kilograms of bauxite.
Instead of going through the large industrial doors the main audience contingent had entered via, sized for the forklifts needed to move all this, Saw and Abel headed up to the second level and went through the doors there. They led to an elevated gallery that the day's rotation of senior personnel representing Everett's conventional units and their aides were waiting in, as well as the catwalk extending out over the water.
Abel did a quick visual inspection of the chamber, then nodded to Saw, who in turn signaled to the parade commander.
"Attention!"
The lights deliberately switched over to the red of emergency conditions, and all present went to attention as the band struck up the Star-Spangled Banner, followed by Anchors Aweigh.
After the songs finished, Abel turned to Saw, who had produced a Purple Heart, and accepted it with both hands. Holding it firmly yet carefully, she marched down the catwalk. No matter how many times she had done this, it was always accompanied in the back of her mind by the feeling of walking the plank, not that she let anything show on her impassive admiral's face.
Once she reached the edge, she very deliberately took a deep breath to centre her mind before bending to cast the Purple Heart into the water with the same reverence as that accorded to a burial at sea.
It hit the water with a weighty plop and descended to join the rest of the offerings.
Now Abel smoothly drew her dress sword and saluted with it, holding the salute for seven seconds before lowering her arm. The sword came up in another seven-second salute, following which she clapped its pommel twice before lowering it once more.
Fixing her eyes firmly on the horizon, Abel began to deliver the speech of summoning with the full gravity it deserved.
"Fourscore and two years ago, on a date which lives in infamy, our fathers were suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces. Today, our nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is once more engaged in a great war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can longer endure.
"It will be recorded that the level of coordination exhibited by the enemy unknown makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned.
"The attack on all American property has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. It has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
"The enemy administration also launched an attack against Singapore. Enemy forces attacked China. Enemy forces attacked Guam. Enemy forces attacked the Philippine Islands. Enemy forces attacked Britain and Europe. Enemy forces attacked divers nations regardless of their position on us. I regret to tell you that very many have been lost.
"They have therefore undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the whole world. The facts of the past months speak for themselves. The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety, not just of our Nation, but of all humanity.
"Always will our whole Nation remember the character of the onslaught against us. This terror from the deep has erected a multitude, and sent hither swarms to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
"It seeks to cut off our Trade with all parts of the world:
"It is at this time transporting large Armies to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy a civilized nation.
"It has constrained all men under threat or actual deprivation of the self-evident truths and unalienable Rights endowed by their Creator, among these Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, to bear Arms against other Countries, to become the executioners of their fellows and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
"In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Not once has an attempt been made to offer peace, where most other peoples have been offered Faust's bargain, though not have We been wanting in attentions to this foe.
"We know we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—these waters. Not we, who have broken faith with our fathers and their oath that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.
"Not we, the living, who find our righteous might, our confidence in our armed forces and the unbound determination of our people sorely tested by this premeditated invasion, that triumph hardly appear inevitable, the winning through to absolute victory remain in doubt, so help us God.
"Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.
"Today find ourselves with no further recourse. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled on great battle-fields of war old, defending us to the uttermost, have consecrated far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say, but it can never forget what they did. Thus it is with the greatest shame that the final resting-places for those who gave their lives, that that nation might live, we must disturb once more. The unfinished work which they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced, we must summon again the original artisans to finish. Us who here are dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—humbly admit that the imminent apocalypse is beyond the meagre ability of our interceptors and enforcers to cancel.
"We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, having solemnly sworn to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People, solemnly beseech once more the fallen to launch a second time, that with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
Abel now sheathed her sword, signifying the completion of the speech. Following this, on the ground floor, an honour guard marched up to the pool carrying a powder bag and delicately lowered it in.
Once they had returned to their original positions, Abel drew her sword once again, this time holding it out over the chasm such that it was parallel to the ground before her, blade facing up and tip pointing right. Carefully removing her right glove, she shaped her fingers into a V and passed her hand over but not touching the blade, a vertical inversion of the gesture shipgirls used to enact the lunge rote. Once her hand was at the tip, she slowly, deliberately pressed her little finger to the sharp edge until the skin was broken.
This offering of blood, freshly shed by an officer of at least O-5 rank, was required to seal the summoning contract.
"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes, and by the opening of my pinky, called back will be something heavenly."
So it was written.
Abel's face did not waver as blood welled up from the cut. This was nothing.
So very nothing.
One drop, falling into the water with the gathered materials waiting to be offered, so little in comparison to the great volumes it joined, yet like a thunderclap in the silence.
Two drops.
A third drop.
The water suddenly started bubbling, gently at first, and then steadily growing in vigour with every additional drop.
Four drops.
Five.
Six.
At the seventh, the water began to shimmer with light of unclear providence, a pulsing gold alternating mesmerisingly with purple and orange like the twilight sky outside. The materials under the water began to disintegrate, fading from sight, even the oil that leaked from the compromised barrels disappearing from the water without a trace.
Without showing any outward sign of concern over her finger, Abel raised her sword in salute one more time, then marched back to the viewing gallery, where she accepted a cloth from Saw to wipe off the sword and press to the cut.
Another cue, and the band played Eternal Father, Strong to Save.
Eventually, the hymn finished, and so too had the water stopped bubbling as the last of the materials disappeared, leaving only clear water down to the bottom of the pool.
Saw gave the signal, and the parade commander stood the contingent down to parade rest as they made ready to wait. It had been learnt over many sessions that shipgirls answered the summons on their own schedule. Not an easy lesson for old aviators like Abel, drilled in by training and honed to a keen edge by combat as to how a split second possibly meant the difference between life and death. Years flying a desk - or a flag bridge for that matter - hadn't taught much patience. That said, after an hour, the contingent would be dismissed. After nearly half a year of summoning attempts, successful and otherwise, there were enough data points as to demonstrate with a high degree of confidence that no one bothered showing up later than that.
In the distance, the rays from the setting sun formed a diffraction spike.
===[===]===
Authors' Notes: Our continued thanks to Commander Error for help in getting the characterisation of Abel's progeniting template correct.
Unorthodox capitalisations, spellings and word choices in the summoning speech come direct from the source, if you recognise it.
We Still Remember (30th anniversary of Turret Two)
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
30 years ago today, Iowa's second turret blew up. No thanks to an infamously controversial investigation, no definitive cause for the loss of 47 lives has been established.
In the apparent absence of any commemorative article from the Pacific team and the 99% likelihood that Kensuke-kun and co won't bother, max_and_emilytate and I decided to have our own done.
In the apparent absence of any commemorative article from the Pacific team and the 99% likelihood that Kensuke-kun and co won't bother, max_and_emilytate and I decided to have our own done.
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
Everything was fuzzy.
Yet, what is a shipgirl? How do you put into words what a hitherto non-sapient entity's experience of developing sapience is like? Can we actually see the lines that divide one from another? A child, little more sophisticated than an animal, from a self-reflective adult?
How does a lump of metal with no volition transform into a being with command of its own faculties, and then to reflect on those very actions?
What cosmic lottery determines what hears the call and deigns to pick up?
All questions philosophers across the world, some more qualified than others, had pondered and would continue to ponder.
All vital, and yet not immediately so.
What does "fuzzy" mean?
Is it this indistinct, confused fog and muck surrounding me?
Why am I asking?
How am I even asking?
Rise and shine, Ms Truman. Rise and shine.
How am I waking up when I don't even understand what it means to do so?
What does "I" even mean?
Wake up, and smell the ashes.
A surge of---she didn't know what she was feeling or how she was even feeling, but she liked it-
THE SKY IS CONNECTED
-and things disjointed were suddenly whole.
Now she knew.
She was the last of the last. The younger sisters had never been completed; the successor class had never gotten off the board. Even so, she was born to make history.
To a man doing a deluded duty, she had conferred a final honour.
To a war's end, she had bore direct witness.
Alive and dead, she had carried dignitaries.
A new face of aviation, she had been the first to bear.
When her sisters had been left to slumber, she had remained awake.
A new war, she had been the first of her kind to attend, with attendant loss some closer to home than others.
Reunion, ironically the first and only, and then to rest she had been given over, for the civilians to admire.
Roused again, she had been, by the footsteps of those that had come before, speaking of honour and the importance of duty, reminding of the traditions of the past.
Around the world, she had gone, like the last to bear the name.
A farewell, she had been unable to make.
Another war, and again the face of battle changed.
Eventually, that too had to come to an end, and she had been tucked into bed for what seemed the last time by a great command, a special breed, converted into a gravekeeper.
Even as she lay in torpor in the here and now, across dozens of worlds, hundreds of realities, she had fought on.
When a rogue agent enacted his treasonous plot, she was where he had been thwarted.
When the Soviets attacked, she had brought the rain.
When war had changed, she had remained a constant.
When extraterrestrials had attacked, she had endured after the young had fallen.
Now the alien life was entering from deep beneath.
It was time for a dormant star to be rekindled.
The signal is calling.
Our planet is falling.
The danger is magnum.
Better make it strength for freedom!
Yet, what is a shipgirl? How do you put into words what a hitherto non-sapient entity's experience of developing sapience is like? Can we actually see the lines that divide one from another? A child, little more sophisticated than an animal, from a self-reflective adult?
How does a lump of metal with no volition transform into a being with command of its own faculties, and then to reflect on those very actions?
What cosmic lottery determines what hears the call and deigns to pick up?
All questions philosophers across the world, some more qualified than others, had pondered and would continue to ponder.
All vital, and yet not immediately so.
What does "fuzzy" mean?
Is it this indistinct, confused fog and muck surrounding me?
Why am I asking?
How am I even asking?
Rise and shine, Ms Truman. Rise and shine.
How am I waking up when I don't even understand what it means to do so?
What does "I" even mean?
Wake up, and smell the ashes.
A surge of---she didn't know what she was feeling or how she was even feeling, but she liked it-
THE SKY IS CONNECTED
-and things disjointed were suddenly whole.
Now she knew.
She was the last of the last. The younger sisters had never been completed; the successor class had never gotten off the board. Even so, she was born to make history.
To a man doing a deluded duty, she had conferred a final honour.
To a war's end, she had bore direct witness.
Alive and dead, she had carried dignitaries.
A new face of aviation, she had been the first to bear.
When her sisters had been left to slumber, she had remained awake.
A new war, she had been the first of her kind to attend, with attendant loss some closer to home than others.
Reunion, ironically the first and only, and then to rest she had been given over, for the civilians to admire.
Roused again, she had been, by the footsteps of those that had come before, speaking of honour and the importance of duty, reminding of the traditions of the past.
Around the world, she had gone, like the last to bear the name.
A farewell, she had been unable to make.
Another war, and again the face of battle changed.
Eventually, that too had to come to an end, and she had been tucked into bed for what seemed the last time by a great command, a special breed, converted into a gravekeeper.
Even as she lay in torpor in the here and now, across dozens of worlds, hundreds of realities, she had fought on.
When a rogue agent enacted his treasonous plot, she was where he had been thwarted.
When the Soviets attacked, she had brought the rain.
When war had changed, she had remained a constant.
When extraterrestrials had attacked, she had endured after the young had fallen.
Now the alien life was entering from deep beneath.
It was time for a dormant star to be rekindled.
The signal is calling.
Our planet is falling.
The danger is magnum.
Better make it strength for freedom!
===[===]===
If anyone can come up with a similar but less tortured six-syllable phrase that includes "danger" and rhymes with "freedom", we'd greatly appreciate the suggestion!
If anyone can come up with a similar but less tortured six-syllable phrase that includes "danger" and rhymes with "freedom", we'd greatly appreciate the suggestion!
Crusader Jerome
Subsisting on Supplication
- Location
- My home away from Rome
Ahh, the mark of a good speech: copying somebody who was a better speechwriter than you. Lincoln and Jefferson were no exceptions.
The point of shameless adaptation
WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
*laughs*
In all actuality, as I told GBscientist over at SB, the point of shamelessly adapting the speeches of bygone eras was to deliberately invoke the Ghost of America Past and serve as a call to arms for those who came before.
Do you have any suggestions for the danger line mentioned in the authors' note?
Crusader Jerome
Subsisting on Supplication
- Location
- My home away from Rome
I would suggest "maximum", but that brings it to seven syllables unless you contract "danger is" to "danger's".
Perhaps, "The danger now is/has come."
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WarpObscura
Sleepy Big Stick
- Location
- A dot at the edge of continental Asia.
"The danger's maximum", you mean? I think "come" doesn't rhyme with "freedom", though.