"Definitely! I've been keeping everything in the rec room in the dorms, so just meet me there when you're ready! Want anyone else to join in with us?"

She looks sidelong at Missouri. "Um..." Why is it so hard to ask to do a social event with the girl that she was JUST KISSING. "Missouri, naturally, and I wouldn't mind seeing Fletcher there either, if she was willing to come along... She seems shy and I'd like to reach out to her if I can. And anyone they'd like to bring?"

"I'd love to, Maxine."

"I think I'll have to bow out, hon. But thank you much for the invite."

"Um, sure. Thank you."

"I'll probably join in as well, although... minor caveat: I have a thing about touch. I'm curious about you, Maxine, but I don't know you well enough for that yet, so expect me to have one of the other girls in the cuddlepile between me and you most of the time."

Everyone keeps digging in and enjoying their food.

Morri kisses Lexi's cheek and then gets up to go get seconds.

"I wasn't expecting a cuddlepile in the first place, so, uh, completely acceptable, Lexington." She looks over at Missouri and smiles. "Once I'm done my paperwork, then." 

She looks back and forth between Missouri and Morrison. "I know my girlfriends. You're probably getting a cuddlepile," she says with a headshake and a fond snicker.

"I... Alright." She turns her attention back to her chicken-fried steak. "The admiral said that you should fill me in some more on the history?"

"Let's go back to the dorms for that. Don't want to remind anyone of their trauma."

She eats the remaining half of her sixth hot dog quickly, then gets up, heading for the dessert counter. "I'll grab a couple things for the road. You can too, if you'd like."

"Oh, yeah..." Maxine falls silent. Maybe not the best conversational topic. 

She finishes her second chicken-fried steak and then comes along with Lexington.

Lexington leads the way to the shipgirl dorms, eating two brownies along the way. Just as she reaches the building, she wipes her hands on the napkin she'd carried them in, balls it up, and tosses it into an outdoor trashcan, all in the same fluid motion that has her swinging through the door.

Inside, there's a small mailroom off to one side, a couple hallways lined with doors, and a large lounge area. A big, U-shaped set of couches stands in front of a large TV with quite a variety of game systems hooked up to it.

Lexi flops onto the couch and puts her feet up on one of the ottomans.

Maxine goes and sits across the U from Lexington, giving her space.

"This is not a happy story. It's better to have a shipgirl tell it to you than one of the humans, because every single one of them is at least a little bit traumatized about it.

"It starts, as best we understand it, with an Abyssal Princess ending up in this world somehow. No one knew what Abyssals or Princesses were until much later, but somehow a Princess appeared. We've got a decent timeline on when it happened, because of a trail of then-mysterious deaths that were later found to resemble what shipgirl guns do to humans, along with a series of very quiet Abyssal cults showing up a month or so later.

"She showed up in a house in the Midwest, killed the occupants, and then made as quiet a path as she could to the Pacific. She eventually set herself up in Guam, and started building up her forces. No one knew she existed for months.

"The first anyone heard of her was when Abyssal raiding parties — much like the one you helped us defeat, but bigger — attacked port cities around the world. They wrecked all the ships, bombarded the ports, and deployed zombie Marines. Normal navies struggled to fight them, because they didn't show up properly on mundane radar, glitching out and only sometimes appearing. It was a slaughter.

"We call it Blood Week, now. Their Marines died as swiftly as the humans did, swifter even, but by then the Abyssals controlled the ocean.

"And that's when someone in the JMSDF, along with some nerds online, figured out how to repurpose the ritual we think was originally used to summon the first Abyssal Princess."

Maxine's eyes grow steadily wider as the story goes on, until - 

"Wait, someone did that deliberately?" 

Lexi shakes her head. "Not deliberately. More like accidentally, we think. Some weeks before the first Abyssal was summoned, an amateur archaeologist found some ancient documents. Redditors started a project of collaboratively translating them, and got far enough to identify that it was a ritual, and how to perform it, but not what the ritual did. That's about when we think those dumbasses in the Midwest got hold of it."

She sighs softly. "A few days later, they translated enough to identify that the ritual was bad news, and put up warnings, but it was too late, we think."

Maxine rubs her face. "Those poor people. It's undoubtably a stupid idea to try a random ritual off the internet, but magic had never worked before then, right? So I can almost forgive them."

A rueful smile and a nod. "Yeah. It's not like anyone seriously thought magic existed at that point. Still, trying a ritual when you don't even know what it's purported to do is a really great way to run into a classic trap of summoning what you can't put down.

"Anyway, After a bunch of workshopping, the Japanese at Yokosuka Naval Base managed to summon their first shipgirls, what they called kanmasu. The first one summoned is Kongou, who manages to single-handedly retake Tokyo and Sagami Bays, fighting continuously for twenty-four hours."

"Wow, that's one tough ship."

"She really is. We all have a lot of respect for Kongou, for being the first of us, and for pulling that off.

"She can hit the Abyssals more easily than the mundane navies can, because we shipgirls are on the same semi-spiritual plane as they are. So she fought without rest for a day straight, until finally the Japanese managed to repeat their earlier trick, and summoned again. They got three destroyers, this time: Akizuki, Teruzuki, and Hatsuzuki. Those three start a patrol across the bays, and Kongou returns to port to a hero's welcome. They feed her and celebrate her, and then she passes out for twelve hours, before waking up, eating more, and relieving the destroyers.

"That's when the UK and US tried to copy the trick. The UK managed it, but the US didn't. There's lots of back and forth about why, but eventually they figure out that it's a combination of reasons, finally developing our current version of the summoning ritual. You'll probably get to see one this week."

Maxine nods. "I'd love to see it, and to learn anythng that can be taught about it. I don't know if my skill hack will help beyond the level you've already got, but... It's definitely worth trying, right?"

"Definitely. We're not going to turn down improved summoning rituals. The secret we eventually figured out was that where the other two navies could reference their monarchs and their hour of direst need, that didn't work for American sailors. We weren't in our hour of direst need, and a monarch's or a leader's orders bounced off our national mythos. Sure, our allies would suffer, but that wasn't our crisis.

"Our national mythos is about individual choice, and about our people, so that's what we had to use in the ritual. It became a recruitment, with a live band playing rock, with screaming sailors in the audience, with hundreds or thousands of people attending. And that worked. We'd managed two summonings through dumb luck before then, but that's when we could pull it off deliberately."

"If the music helps, it might be worth it for me to try singing at one of the summonings. I'd need practice beforehand, but my voice is one of the things my magic's given me an upgrade to."

"Worth a shot," she replies with a nod. "Probably talk to Nola, or Jersey when she gets back. Those two usually lead the band, along with some sailors with rock experience. A magically enhanced voice could definitely give the performance some kick."