If you're here because of Rule 1629, then take a seat. We'll be here for a while. Also, there will be unmarked spoilers for Ambience: A Fleet Symphony
Fridge Horror
So, what are the consequences of Damon being killed and effectively removed from Ambience: A Fleet Symphony before he acquires Murakumo? For starters, way too many, and most of them involve the ship girls that he would discover, and then acquire for his "fleet".......or in this case, NOT discover, because he's dead.
- Amatsukaze. She's found, unactivated, in an open pod in an auto repair shop somewhere in Montgomery, Alabama, in the possession of one of the many gangs that are vying for control of what's left of the city. One might ask: "What are they going to do with her? They don't have the means, knowledge, nor the ability to activate her.", and they'd be right. But that's not all the gang-bangers could do. Let's fast forward a bit to Operation Trenton. Prior to this, a bunch of residents in the Trenton CCPL post rebelled and managed to take it over, and then started looting buildings in the surrounding factory district. One of those buildings had the pod of Kisaragi, opened, leaving the inactive shipgirl at the mercy of the elements.......and some of the rebels who thought it would be a good idea to have sex with, no, commit rape on what was effectively an inanimate corpse. Amatsukaze was looking at a similar fate had she not been found by Damon and Murakumo in time.
- Mutsu. The Atlanta faction ended up fighting members of another unknown faction trying to secure four of the ship girls that were sent to NAS Charleston (The remaining two were Murakumo and Amatsukaze, and we know where they ended up). They fended them off and got away with the haul......with the exception of Mutsu and her rigging, as the truck carrying her was destroyed by a member of the other faction firing an RPG at it, sending her pod and her rigging into water next to the station. Again, without Damon, she would've been stuck at the bottom for god knows how long.
- The Macon University survivalists. They had been under constant attack by Atlanta troops that had been using the nearby Collisieum Medical Centre as their base, and when Damon, Murakumo, and Amatsukaze show up at the university while on their way to Charleston, they arrive to witness yet another raid by Atlanta faction troops, and it's almost immediatly clear that the university survivalists are outgunned. Even if the survivors had successfully fought off the troops without Damon and co.'s help, they'd just keep coming back. If Damon and the girls hadn't decided to help Chad, DJ, and the rest of the university survivors in an assault on the medical centre, either the assault would've gone very badly for the university survivors, or it just wouldn't happen at all, which would lead to the university being eventually overrun and all the survivors at the mercy of the Atlantans, and based on what we saw happen to Chad's girlfriend, the results of this will not be pretty.
- Sanford, Damon's godfather. A few weeks prior to the events of chapter 1, during a routine helicopter flight, his aircraft was forced to land in Atlanta territory when it was struck by a SAM. Someone in the Atlanta faction party that captured him seemed to know that he was part of the FLEET Project, and basically sent him to work under the faction leader, Malcolm O'Reily, in order to reactivate the ship girls that they had gotten their hands on. Without Damon rescuing him and Kaga from the Atlanta Congress Centre, where he, Kaga, and Baxter Harrison were being held, he would've been stuck there for the rest of his life, never able to re-unite with his godson nor any of the surviving ST6 members.
- Alternatively, it's highly likely that with his spec-ops training and experience, that he would escape from his prison of sorts, and effectively take up his godson's role in the story, that is going around attempting to gather up the shipgirls that his team had made. That said, given certain spoilery things he'd done in the backstory and what does happen when he's in command at certain parts of the story, the results of that may not actually have been for the better.
- Shigure, Yuudachi, and Shoukaku. These were the three girls that were found at NAS Corpus Christi, but not before Damon and co. eliminate a bunch of Mexicans that landed at the base shortly after they did........and they had with them a bag of partially used navitasium cubes. These were huge red flags regrading the "secrecy" of the FLEET Project. But the second question, after "How did they know about the ship girls?", is "What were they doing here, and why did they have the cubes?" Many, many chapters later, during Damon's solo op in Mexico shortly after his first revival, we get out answer. It was NOT the Mexicans' first trip. They had been here previously and had taken two shipgirls with them, Umikaze, and Kawakaze, who were being used as sex slaves by Inner Circle agents, and nearly broken to the point of unresponsiveness from all the abuse. Had Damon and the team not made the stop at Corpus Christi when they did (either because they were too late, or, with Damon dead, never made the trip there), those three girls would've ended up joining Umikaze and Kawakaze, and shared the same fate as well.
- On a similar note, what happened at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in New Orleans right after. As Sanford and Damon make their approach on the base by air, there's clear signs of urban combat throughout the streets of New Orleans. When they manage to off load the ship girls that their respective choppers had been carrying onto the base's premises, it's clear that the base was already being raided by one of the unknown factions involved in the street fighting. Not only that, two ship girl pods containing Samidare and Suzukaze were already being loaded into trucks, and would've gotten away had the team not intervened and confiscated the pods before leaving the area. Again, who knows what may have happened to those two had those trucks gotten away with them.
- All the above frige horrors, however, do not, and will not top this particular one regarding Tawney Blackwood, POTUS. At the start of the fic, the USG had already recovered and activated a dozen-or-so of the FLEET Project girls. What Blackwood had been doing behind the back of the rest of his staff however, was nanomachine research. During the climax of the Stolen Fleet arc, we nearly see the end result. First, he's undergone an upgrade courtesy of the fruits of his research. Second, in the name cementing his own immortal presidency, he plans to impregnate ALL of the Combined Fleet so he can cultivate and mass-produce his own "family" of daughter-soldiers to take over the world. While in the fic itself, his plans are thwarted when he is killed in a duel against Damon, with Damon out of the picture thanks to Ooyodo's short-sighted actions (though, frankly, she would have no way of knowing this was going to happen, and neither did the snippet's author, as he had never read past the first few chapters), unless Blackwood's plan is discovered, and Blackwood himself either locked away or assassinated before he could perform the upgrade, there would no other person on Earth capable of stopping post-upgrade Blackwood from carrying out this plan to the very end. To sum it up, for the want of this universe's Murakumo, ALL THE OTHER SHIP GIRLS ARE DOOMED.
