Nimbus Child I: Games of War

Chapter 10

"So we have no idea about the whereabouts of the demonic ship, the AIs' learning process can't be sped up, but at least we're stressed??"

"First of all, why do you sound like Tirpitz?", Bougainville started, lounging in her chair, a plate of cheese and grapes by her arm, "second, yes."

Montana was essentially lying on the table by now, even though she started out with sitting relatively normally, and made some kind of fake crying noise into the tabletop.

Bougainville watched her calmly.

"I wanna do somethiiing! I feel so useless~!", the superbattleship wiggled around like a fish on land.

"That's the fate of big ships like you", she twirled a toothpick in between her fingers, ignoring the whine from below, "you should be happy about only doing patrol duty."

Somehow, Montana mustered the ability to grow arms, slammed them on the table to press herself up and wailed: "WHY!?"

"Would you rather see your friends die in a war?", Bougainville asked.

"No..."

"You also... cost too much", Tirpitz suddenly joined in from behind the sloop's chair, swooping in to steal one of the snacks.

Her second mental model did the same: "You just need too much fuel."

That made Montana's arms give out and their owner flopped down on the table again with a loud BANG!

For her part, Bougainville was fascinated about how well Tirpitz was ignoring the fact that she also needed too much fuel.

"Why can't I just use my flagship equipment then?", Montana whined again.

The flagship equipment turned them from normal ships with a few Fog abilities into real Fleet of Fog ships that didn't need fuel, after all.

"For the same reason the Fog can't", answered mental model #2 while sitting on the table and rolling her eyes, #1 trying to steal more food fromBougainville, "it takes a lot of energy, so we can't just pull it out for every patrol."

Montana whined some more, words sounding vaguely like "endless" and "fuel" escaping, which made Tirpitz punch her on the head.

"OW!"

"Hmpf!"

They had more or less endless fuel for everyone in this Afterlife, because the auxiliary ship Mars Nova had seemingly endlessly refueling stocks of it - the keyword being "seemingly".

Mars Nova was not a "real" ship - she hadn't existed in the world of the living - she was here when the first of them arrived, a sort of parting gift from God.

The problem was just, since Mars Nova was of godly origin, then what would stop God from making the fuel tanks stop refilling overnight? Nothing, absolutely nothing.

Since that was the case, Sonne had gotten her gang of auxiliary ships and made them all carry as much extra fuel as they could, before the well dried up.

As such, giving fuel to giants like Montana was currently out of the question.

Bougainville was still busy fending off Tirpitz, so her voice was slightly strained: "Why is the second mental model active?"

"I'm in a talky mood which makes me... talky", said model replied.

"So you're just here to talk and steal my food!?"

"Yes", #2 replied, while #1 mouthed it at the same time.

"WHY!?", she exclaimed this time around.