Late to the Party
Date: 2020/8/17
Time: 6:08 AM
I ran weird hours at the best of times. And while it often ran hell on my body, sometimes I'd find moment like this where those weird hours payed off. This moment? Sunrise after a fresh summer rain. I was sitting staring out the window admiring the crimson light as it bled through the last of the rain cloud. Of course, I wasn't just staring out at nothing for no reason, I was waiting for the matchmaker of the fairly popular World of Warships to drop me and my Nagato-Class battle ship into a game. I will never admit to anyone that I had stalled out on the line in favor of unlocking the Shokaku, and I never said this, your imagining things.
Had I been paying attention to the computer screen rather then the mighty rising sun, I might have noticed the lack of player data for the opposing team. But In its Glorious Incandescence, I missed the first hint that something was very very wrong. My second hint was when it all went black at the sound of the match start buzzer.
Location: Unknown
Time: Sunrise
Its hard to say what really brought me back to the world of the conscious. Between the distant rumble of boiler driven steam turbines, the hiss of Hydralics, a gentle rocking motion, or a repeated pounding in my head that went hand in hand with a clank that carried through the entire area. I frankly have to attribute my rousing to the Pounding in my head, which seemed to precede the noise by a fraction of a second or the time it takes noise to cross 100 meters plus of cold hard steel.
Yeah, going from a wooden home in a comfy chair to a cold hard steel room on a shitty cot really should be more concerning then why I hear a pounding noise of something rhythmically hitting steel. For whatever reason, the surroundings felt... Right, and it drove me to investigate the noise. So in a bit of a daze, I began to march towards the noise, feeling a little like a horror movie character all the while.
Looking back, I sorta wish I had been right with that feeling and someone had done to me what the
Sealion had done to the Kongou. It would have spared me a lot of pain and suffering in the long run.
With a weird and unnerving precision I ended up making my way towards the noise, never really questioning why the bulkheads and hatches opened before and closed behind me. And as I came out from the bowels of the hull onto the deck, near what a part of me knew instinctively to be the #2 turret (of 4 which each boasted the might of 45 caliber 16 inch guns,) I found that there was a voice roaring words to go along with the constant clanging. Yelling to the tune of well...
"GET OUT HERE YOU STUPID SLEEPING NAGATO-CLASS! THEY'RE COMING FAST AND WE NEED TO RUN NOW OR WERE SUNK!"
This drew a moment of shock from me for a number of reasons. The first was why was I in the middle of the Ocean on a ship class all sunk back in the 1940's sitting next to a 3 turreted 203mm armed cruiser of the Aoba-class which had suffered a similar fate?
The second had to be why was a
Brunette with her hair done up in a pig tail wearing a sailor fuka top and shorts kicking
My bow/head/prow the bow of the Nagato from the bow of the Aoba.
And third went to how I understood Japanese and could speak it rather fluently.
"WHO ARE YOU CALLING STUPID YOU UNDER GUNNED HEAVY CRUISER! AND WHO ARE WE RUNNING FROM!"
My rather snide and carefully aimed jab was ignored as the girl proceeded to break everything I knew about physics to go from roughly 70 meters away to a third of a meter in all of about 1 second while bridging some 15 meters in height differences.
"Alright, listen," Her tone was relaxed, but the way she kept scanning the horizon betrayed that. "There's a group of 4 abysul Standard type battleships steaming this way with full escorts at about 15 knots." US standard type battleships where slow but had armor as thick as their guns where large. Which was a very bad thing, and despite my dawning realization of horror, she continued unabated. "They are about half an hour out, but we're a day and a half from the nearest friendly port and 2 hours the nearest allied force. We need to get moving very soon. However, before that, congratulations. Your now the bounded soul of a Nagato-class Battleship, name pending."
"But I'm not a Nagamo-" My interruption was quashed with out mercy with barely a hand gesture before the girl steamed ahead.
"This ship is you, you are this ship. Once you get to the bridge things are gonna make a fair bit more sense, but until then, Set engines to full and follow me. WE NEED TO GO NOW." As the lass rounded up her little spiel, she then jumped to the now underway Aoba's aft before firing off one last remark. "Follow this Shapely Aft like I do a Juicy story!"
And that's how I found myself following Aoba in all her steely glory in a daze aboard a Nagato while heading to the bridge.
AN:900 words is good enough for a break for now. More to come once I've had some sleep I think. And a question to whoever reads enough of this to reach the AN, does the pseudo journal style fit well? Can you tell that I might be using an Unreliable Narrator already? Is it decent to maybe even good quality despite the headache and fever I'm running right now?
