"Good!" Kalina said a little too quickly, giving a big smile to Supply Depot. "You're getting along and going to be the best of friends, I can just tell. This week will be great for you guys - I mean, as great as it can go when you need to save the world, but I'm sure you'll be thick as thieves by the time you have to sail out of here."
She took a step back.
"Well if you don't need me anymore, I've got some work to go do. Not all of us are beautiful robot warriors who get the luxury of lounging around gathering energy, and I still don't know how to use pivot tables in Excel...."
She took another step back.
Something instantly distracted her from her gameless fugue, and her clouded-over eyes snapped into full attention.
"You don't? Really?"
What kind of commander wouldn't want to be able to use them? Even if it was an archaic system, S.D. had been studying Excel intently over the preceding months.
"Then let me teach you. You're not going to be able to use it any more than a kid could without understanding all of its features."
Akuma Shogun
Z-chan noticed that Supply Depot was staring at her playing at Super Cutie Wars Compact 1. Luckily, Supply Depot was distracted by Kalina. Thank goodness. It would've gone violent if she reached over and tried to steal Z-chan's portable console. Her grandpa gave it to her for her birthday.
"Oh um... you know... well, okay?" Kalina shrugged nervously and turned over her tablet to Supply Depot.
The man-hours she was allocating to maintenance and repair tasks were all done painstakingly by hand, each column manually summing up workloads and materials. The results were somewhat accurate, but when multiplied out over the course of the week, there was enough of a gap from overestimating values that there was a little bit of worker time left unaccounted for, which would be apparent when properly using a pivot table. Enough time to assign a few workers towards renovating a single room in the base over the course of the next week.
One Week Later....
After several days spent gathering energy, learning how to work together, and enduring the cafeteria food, the rag-tag group of moegirls had their first mission: Reclaiming Pearl Harbor.
Venturing out of the occlusion zone from the Kauai base, it was a brisk hundred-mile journey to the Honolulu base. As was expected, absolutely nothing was waiting for them for the entirety of their trip. Once they arrived, however, the base defenses and automated systems slowly began to come online. With how sluggishly they were activating, only a handful of anti-infantry UA Vs, a few gun emplacements, and a missile battery were able to defend during the assault, ultimately getting destroyed in the process.
The base personnel were frozen in place, offering no resistance or hindrance as they were encapsulated by a thin, cloudy, ice-like substance. Once they had fought their way to the portal at the heart of the base, which discharged the residual energy inside of them into the portal to convert it, it was as if a fog had lifted and everyone sprang to life once more. Thankfully, with the base and its equipment online again, a series of messages from the S.H.I.K.I.K.A.N. Base were able to clarify the situation and get things squared up.
Pearl Harbor Command Center
"Well, we need as many personnel as possible just to maintain the base and run patrols around all of the Pacific that you've unfrozen," Honolulu
◊ explained. "But we can spare you some personnel. Take Springfield and Thunder back with you, they should provide some valuable support. We can get you a trainee too, Kimberly's fresh off the shipyard so she's wet behind the ears, but I'm sure she'll learn how to help out with patrols and commissions in no time."
She called for the three women on her radio, and within a minute they were all gathered in the command center alongside the victorious S.H.I.K.I.K.A.N. folks.
"I know you don't have much time to spare, but it's going to take a little longer to fuel up a ship to take you all back, so feel free to get to know each other in the meantime." Honolulu held her hands together as she considered something. "And thank you again for your help - the thought of being stuck as a CPU for the rest of my life gives me the willies." She shuddered from a case of the willies that thinking about things had given her.
Edited by nman on Apr 21st 2019 at 11:49:31 AM
Akuma Shogun
Z-Chan - Honolulu Base
Man, that was a tough mission. Z-Chan had to fight off like a bajillion enemies with her best friends on the force. Even with her arsenal at hand, Z-Chan was pushed to her limits. She was even forced to use her rotten breath and ice breath attacks. At least, she transformed into a gigantic fist and punched the shit out of the big bad guy at the end of the mission.
The thanks Z-Chan got from Honolulu is a just enough reward for the robot girl. On top of that, Z-Chan will get to know the new girls. They'll even arrive in person. Sweet!
“You're welcome, boss~ I'm just doing my job, man.”
Edited by josh6243 on Apr 21st 2019 at 11:36:19 AM
Brought into a situation where she definitely was NOT at the advantage, S.D. found herself working with her hands and grumbling to herself all the while.
"Why send in an installation-type like myself out to fight on land," she thought as she hid behind her gauntlets, the automated M61 Vulcan turret pouring its lead into her black alloy.
"I'm not good for any of this. They're wasting my talent, they should've sent some backup," as she advanced forward like a man hiding behind his scutum in a testudo formation. She was close enough when she could hear bullets bouncing back onto it.
"They couldn't even hand me a pistol or something," as she reached out to grab the rapidly spinning, red hot barrel and rip it off to throw at the next one.
She grumbled to herself a lot that day. All of this mortal danger wasn't good for her mental state.
In the end, a lot of the automated defences had been torn to pieces by her. Maybe even most of them. The UAVs were left to the people who could actually reach them, because with these gauntlets on she could barely lift her feet off the ground.
A great success for her, but not that she'd notice it. Even if they were safe and found a new ally, and she could tell nothing was actually wrong with her body, the few holes in her skin oozing out a dark blue blood made her just unreasonable.
S.D. didn't even look at the new recruits, they were just more ships to supply with already limited resources. She had her rueful eyes set on Honolulu, one closed from the fluid leaking down her pale face.
"You're the main base," she was quick to spit out, "You have supplies to spare. We barely managed to send out just us few, so start sharing. Now."
Edited by wikkit on Apr 22nd 2019 at 3:29:06 AM
"But I'm... not a man?" Honolulu looked flustered at Z-Chan's praise. As if not entirely sure, she took a glance down at herself, just to see if she could confirm her thesis.
She shook her head.
"Well we can probably spare some food, and provide your with some soldiers and engineers, a few other other personnel, and keep your base supplied with fuel," Honolulu answered Supply Depot. "But we're also a full base. That means thousands of mouths to feed and soldiers to keep busy, plus civilians. And while you're off saving the world, we're going to have to take care of everything else. We may not be able to venture out into the Network like you can, but we're going to have to patrol every square inch of what we can reach and maintain the entire perimeter around our bases and anything we want secured. Even a fishing fleet can't go out without protection right now."
Honolulu held her hand to her chin.
"But if you really need more than our normal rations..." Honolulu thought. "Lānaʻi." She said the single word and nodded. "I hope you ladies like pineapple. But we've got a whole island up there filled to the brim with pineapples. They closed down and evacuated the island in '92 after the incident darned genetic testing... so there's dozens of miles of rampant pineapple weeds just waiting to be picked. Normally there's that whole private ownership thing, but considering the extenuating circumstances, you can probably take control of it from Dole and make it belong to S.H.I.K.I.K.A.N.."
"Um.... I think I heard rumors about cargo ship that wrecked years ago, back when the wars were just starting up," Kimberly spoke up. "But they say it was loaded up with one last haul of all sorts of American food, trying to make it back to Asia before any embargo and tariffs. And on a dark, stormy night, if you find the atoll you can hear the ghosts of the crew.... But then nobody ever went looking for it because it wasn't cost-effective to try locating it! But now that we're cut off from the rest of the world...."
"Uh, thank you, Kimberly, that was... lovely?" Honolulu tried to spare the boat girl's feelings, but honestly, that sounded pretty dumb.
"Hmmph, all this for... pineapples and ghost stories. I hate this whole Earth," Graf Zeppelin sneered, one hand rubbing her banged-up left leg. Her legendary gams were all scratched up thanks to one lucky UAV payload, which didn't bother her all that much in the water, but it was a pain in the ass - or hamstring, more accurately - walking on land. just so they could do all this to try saving a measly, worthless planet. Fighting the dark gods was all well and good, but nobody had said it would be this annoying.
"You don't look so good," she added to SDP.
Edited by nman on Apr 22nd 2019 at 7:51:10 AM
Akuma Shogun
Z-Chan - Honolulu Base
Honolulu took her slang for friend literally. Was Honolulu raised on a barn or something? It would be rude if Z-Chan mentioned that, though.
“Thanks for the pineapples. I'll cherish them as much as any girl, I guess?”
Upon hearing there was a ghost ship, Z-Chan grins. Is it possible that her sisters Grendizer and Great Mazinger are among the crew? Nah, that would be ridiculous. They were built after Z-chan. What are the odds of them getting stranded somewhere?
“That ghost ship sounds like a fun time. When can we explore it?”
Horror of horrors! Great calamity! There wasn't a single video game in the entire base!
Sure, if there were a bunch of normal computers S.D. could do her job just fine, but jobs and personal entertainment were two different things...even if she liked doing her job. Our beleaguered supply officer was going to have to rough it.
"Yes...I'll make do with a Nintendo..."
If you looked closely, you could see her abyssal soul slowly floating out of her mouth, ready to go on to a more peaceful life. "Maybe I'll get to be a schooner," it thought to itself, as it moved on towards the light in the sea...
Not so fast! Reeling in her damned spirit back into her mouth, S.D. regained a bit of whatever life she had upon sighting vidya in the hands of that foreign girl.
It was nothing like she had ever seen, it must have been a Game Boy...of the future.
She leaned over the shoulders of Kawakaze and Kalina, looking at it with greedy eyes...