Heavy Cruiser Takao

[Name]: Kobayashi
[Age]: 24
[Contacts]:
♦ Plurk: PerfectSquare
[Timezone]: Pacific
[Other Characters]: N/A



[Name]: Takao
[Canon]: Arpeggio of Blue Steel
[Age]: Unknown; has had a mental model for less than 2 years
[Gender]: Female
[Canon Point]: Chapter 50

[History]: http://aokihagane.wikia.com/wiki/Takao

[Personality]: Takao is perhaps one of the Fog to undergo the most drastic change in motives and personality seen in the series. When first encountered, her expression is wide-eyed and robotic, her mannerisms arrogant and egotistical. She regards herself superior to I-401 and her crew, and not without reason – as a heavy cruiser, she is – or at least should be – much more heavily armed than the submarine and her hidden trump card of I-501 gives her much better detection than they would think, which indeed causes trouble for I-401 and her crew. Her presentation is ostentatious and showy as she prepares to sink them, but in the end, Takao is the one taken by surprise by the super graviton cannon that I-401 looted from Hyuuga and forced to retreat.

This defeat forces Takao to reconsider humans as well as her own powers, and she comes to the conclusion that she should obtain a crew – in particular, the crew of the I-401. At first this starts simply as a desire to improve herself as a weapon – against all of her experience, Gunzou managed to predict her attack and barely dodge it based on instinct, a concept foreign to the Fleet of Fog; if Takao were to obtain a human crew, she could make use of such tactics as well. However, in the week that follows, she spends time among humans, pretending to be one and interacting with many of them, learning much about their ways and culture. In particular, she intrudes upon the home of Chihaya Saori, Gunzou’s mother, though Takao never found out that they were related until much later. There she spent time learning about things like birds and housework, but also things about being human, like family and having fun. Besides interacting with Saori every day, Takao would go out with the maid there and go out on the down, doing everything from shopping to drinking at bars. She cultivated emotions like curiosity, friendship, affection and interest in individual humans. A fanciful nature can be seen in the apartment she kept, with all its frilly adornments and decorations, some made from nanomaterials, others purchased from more normal sources. When she finally leaves human society to return to the seas, she’s changed to a much less warlike and arrogant person, though she’s still rather selfish and not entirely honest with her feelings. Over this time with her focus on humans as individual people and not just units to be used to enhance herself, her focus on obtaining the crew of I-401 has narrowed down to just Chihaya Gunzou, the captain, perhaps in part due to her reading on naval matters stating that the captain is the most important person on the vessel who commands the ship entirely. This, combined with a questionably functioning Maiden Plug In simulator, leads to Takao’s many fantasies about being “captained” by Chihaya Gunzou, an ongoing crush throughout the series.

It is at this point, after her stay among humans and with Saori that Takao starts to stray from the Fog. When confronted by I-400 and I-402, she entertains the possibility of fighting them but in the end goes along with the will of the Fog, saying she intends to get close to Gunzou as he is an important enemy, though her intentions are not entirely so loyal. As well, she predicts Gunzou’s victory over Haruna and Kirishima, who had currently engaged in battle with I-401, something unheard of before since the Fog were originally weapons without sense of past or future, much less the ability to use intuition to predict outcomes that calculated predictions would not otherwise lead to. Leaving the those two, she heads to Iwo Jima, the base of the Blue Fleet, Gunzou’s group, and it is there that she finally meets that fateful crew again. When she does, it’s quite clear how much she’s changed compared to when they last met her. Rather than cold, imperious and calculating, she acts very human, getting flustered, panicking, putting on a front, acting prideful, bickering or fawning, and many other emotions. She’s much more interested in talking with the human crew, and her fascination with Gunzou has gone far beyond a weapon desiring a capable user to what is obviously and perhaps exaggeratedly the interest of a girl in love – Hyuuga, another Mental Model, questions why she even installed the maiden plug in for her emotional simulation and suggests that Takao have her fantasy simulator fixed. It’s from this point she starts to earn the nickname “Tsundere Heavy Cruiser” even among other members of the Fog, because of how she tends to shoot her own efforts to get closer to Gunzou down either through embarrassment or pride. Still, she ends up cooperating with them and joins the Blue Fleet, even changing her ship’s red appearance to a blue one, and helping with their escape from Iwo Jima when the army attacks. It’s during this that she shows both her eagerness to help and her fascination with learning, quickly assimilating knowledge about human biology in order to make convincing replica dummies. Even further determination and loyalty to her new, chosen fleet is shown when she engages in battle with U2501 while transporting the fake I-401 the army had captured. Despite hardships, she tried to avoid letting I-401 and Gunzou know she was in trouble, nor did she abandon the dummy to free up her computational power because it would tip off the army and let them know that the real I-401 had escaped. She also demonstrated her vastly improved tactical ability, both fighting admirably and managing to fake her own defeat so that the crew of U2501 would lower their guard, and would have destroyed them if not for U2501’s final trump card. Then when she was being destroyed, she refused to break apart her mental model because she was wearing the shirt of the Blue Fleet and wanted to maintain the body that had become so close to Gunzou, and not return to just a Union Core, the CPU of the Fog Ships, even at the risk of death.

In the end she was captured and reconstituted by the Supereme Flagship Yamato, leader of the Fleet of Fog. Despite being the heart of enemy territory and with little to no weaponry, Takao attempted to fight back, deciding there was no way to reconcile her decisions to join the Blue Fleet and the objectives of the Fleet of Fog. In the end she was defeated and restrained. She shows quite a bit of useless pride in the fact that she’s restrained by a set of hair ties that randomize her hairstyle if she tries to resist (“I can’t go back to Gunzou looking like this!”), but considering doing so means forcefully rearranging her nanomaterials, which not just her hair and clothes, but her entire Mental Model is made of, it can be presumed it’s actually a much more dire threat keeping her in place. Even in such a hopeless situation though, she still hopes and plans to rejoin the Blue Fleet.

Takao has grown from a cold, arrogant weapon to a forceful, cunning and occasionally silly woman, her heart guided by love and loyalty rather than efficiency and a cold code. She’s come to enjoy human society and make friends with various people, as well as regard herself and her fellow mental models as people and not just weapons. She holds true to her own ideology even in the face of adversity or when logic may dictate a better course, and has come to place sentimental value in objects. She is one of the Fog who has grown the most from human contact and come to very much change who she is.

Takao has a rather prideful personality, though not so much as that it blinds her. She’s very much about keeping appearances and tries not to look the fool, even if she often does. Very straight forward, she can be aggressive and very competitive. Her self-asserted nature can have other effects though, such as her tendency to go overboard with certain things like decorating or her pursuits, or her somewhat capricious temper. Her attitudes can change on a dime, easily getting irritated at others who look down on her or don’t take her seriously, to becoming the blushing maiden at the slightest attention from her object of affection. The latter rears its head as often as the former, with Takao becoming easily flustered or embarrassed when dealing with Gunzou, though not to the point that she can’t handle him at all, often able to muster her composure for at least a little while. Even when not dealing with him though, she’s prone to fantasizing about stealing him away from I-401 and having him become her captain, in rather overblown maidenly delusions.

Gunzou isn’t the only human she’s been interested in though. Takao is friendly, even affectionate with many of the other people she’s met, and during her stay on land, she showed a genuine interest in human culture and learning what sort of things they do and act like. It wasn’t a scientific interest, but a personal one, as she enjoys experiencing these things that humans do, not just studying it academically. She’s curious, inquisitive and also very open to new experiences. A lot of her time there was spent learning how to act more human, how to be more human. She did things like adjust her tastes to what humans consider to taste good, even though she doesn’t need to eat food. She decorated her room in rather ostentatiously girly fashion, despite never inviting anyone in to see it. Through all this, she learned to follow her feelings more than her calculations.

Those feelings have led her on a course that is very much her own and at first straying from, then completely in opposition of the Fleet of Fog. Not one easily swayed, she stands firm in her belief and loyalty to Gunzou’s Blue Fleet, even when faced with overwhelming firepower. She shows determination both in her fight against U-2501 up the very last moments, and even when directly faced with the Supreme Flagship of the Fog. Still, while stubborn and determined, she’s not stupid either. She knows when she has no chance and it’s better to cooperate for a better chance later. While temperamental, snappy, prone to flipping from angry to charmed to composed in seconds, Takao isn’t someone who acts without thinking, so she can hardly be called flighty or unreliable. Determined and loyal, she’s very trustworthy and takes her duties very seriously, often overly so. She has a definite independent streak though and doesn’t like to be looked down on, so she’s reluctant to ask for help from those relying on her – she’s more than willing to accept the help of others she’s not putting up such a front for though.

[Abilities / Strengths & Weaknesses]:
First of all, Takao is modeled after the Takao-class Heavy Cruiser from World War II. This alone means she’s a little over 200 meters long, or close to 660 feet, making her 3-4 times the size of most sailing frigates. As well, she’s of the Fleet of Fog, and is constructed from nanomaterials, diverse nanomachines that basically function as stem cells in they can be assigned to form any number of different structures or systems, from the armor to the guns to the bodies of the Mental Models. This means she can repair damaged areas by reassigning nanomaterials from other parts of her ship. As well, she has incredible computational power, able to control all the parts of a ship that would normally require at least a crew of dozens to manage, as well as calculate for trajectories and other things in battle. She can also hack electronic systems more or less by thinking it, able to easily take over destroyers in the Fleet of Fog and other comparable computer systems. Besides sonar and the other normal functions of a ship of the modern era, she’s capable of electronically scanning her surroundings or using infrared and a variety of other methods to analyze her surroundings, even when on land just as an extension of her Mental Model.

The Mental Model is a humanoid simulation run by her Union Core, a body created of nanomaterials as well as emotional and psychological simulations to emulate humanity. This lets the Fog perceive things they otherwise would not have, such as giving them a sense of past and future, the ability to form tactics and strategies rather than simply reacting to the current situation as automated weapons, and work through otherwise non-logical routes such as intuition. Unintended side-effects are the development of other emotions and personality and other human traits.
While modeled after a World War II era ship, Takao is equipped with weaponry that exceeds even the modern era, which led to the Fog’s dominance at sea. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the Wave Force Armor which generates the Klein Field, a sort of force field that absorbs impacts and damage and allows it to be redirected elsewhere. Though there is a limit to what it can absorb before needing to release, it’s well beyond the bounds of conventional weaponry. Klein Fields have only been shown being saturated by other weaponry of the fog, such as photon cannons (that replace the conventional artillery on their ships) and corrosive torpedoes, which use Thanatonium to create graviton degeneration and destroy large areas at once. They can also be pierced by single forces that are simply beyond their powers to absorb, such as Super-Graviton Cannons. Super-Graviton Cannons are massive arrays that condense gravity waves before firing them in a narrow beam at the target. The range is only limited by the ship’s engine output, normally only firing 10-20km. The power on them is such that they warp the ocean around them when charging before being fired. Not even the Fog’s Klein Field can protect against such an attack if it’s a direct hit. It’s an extremely powerful weapon, but it takes considerable time to charge up and it’s hard to re-aim. As well, Fog vessels need to open a hole in their own Klein field to fire, leaving them momentarily defenseless in that direction. Photon Cannons are particle cannons that can either fire powerful, continuous beams or spray multiple shots for anti-air or anti-missile coverage. As well, her cannons can be fitted to fire conventional weaponry. All in all, her weapons include, but are not limited to: Super-Graviton Cannon, ten main Photon cannons on five turrets, several torpedo tubes and a great number of vertical missle-launchers of various calibers. Takao also possesses a powerful Wave-Force armor that can take several hits from Corrosive Warhead Torpedoes before reaching saturation.

Her Mental Model itself is also capable of utilizing a lesser form of the Klein Field and has superhuman strength, as demonstrated by her leaping dozens of meters from the pier to her own ship or Haruna using her mental model to rip the top off of a tank. The Klein Field can also be used offensive, projections of it used to push away enemies with significant force.

As well, despite being modeled after a Heavy Cruiser, all Fog ships are capable of underwater submersion, though in the case of Takao and most other surface vessels, their mobility and combat ability is severely hampered.

Most of her weaknesses are personality based ones. Takao has gained vast experience in tactics since her first battles, but there are still many who can outmaneuver her – so far she has been defeated by every human crew she’s faced, and those are not even shown to be necessarily masters of their fields, if at least skilled. She also is very prideful and can be borderline reckless when on the offensive, tending to strike quickly and decisively, instead of erring on the side of caution. She is reluctant to show weakness to others and ask them for help if they are people she cares about – despite life threatening conditions, she did her best to hide the fact she was engaged in combat with U-2501 to keep Gunzou and the others from worrying about her or possibly turning back to save her. As well, while not as egotistical as before, she’s still somewhat narcissistic about her appearance and how she appears before others, and is quick to anger and irritation. Rather, her emotions are prone to quick turnabouts in general, making her not the most level-headed person. This can also make her difficult to deal with and it can’t be said that there are too many who regard her as a friend.

[Limited Powers]:
Obviously, almost all of Takao’s technology is completely ridiculous compared to what is available in High Seas. Besides sealing all of her weapons – though she can either be outfitted with in-game weapons or convert her more advanced weaponry to fire cannonballs and the like – her Wave Force Armor and Klein Field are reduced to a level where it’s possible for bombs or various character powers to actually saturate it or in more powerful cases, pierce it - still a significant advantage over the average wooden tub, but not invincible. Her speed would also be cut down to in the same range as other vessels.

A limiting factor of the environment itself is that without the proper resources, it’s almost impossible for Takao to replace lost nanomaterials. And unless someone can produce appropriate technology, she can’t replace her damaged parts with manmade ones to free up those nanomaterials either.

[Other Important Facts]:
She uses her nanomaterials to make completely frivolous things like hug pillows and has no sense of taste when it comes to internal decorating.

[Samples]:
♦ Thread: here
♦ Post:
[Despite being handwritten supposedly, the words that appear in the journal are surprisingly even and formatted, almost like typing]

WANTED: CAPTAIN AND CREW

Currently seeking a captain and possibly crew members to man a Takao-class Heavy Cruiser in finding a way out of this underdeveloped world. Captain should be bold, decisive, good with tactics and strategies and preferably dashing. [AKA they should look like Gunzou] Crew needed to operate artillery, sonar, engines and internal systems. Familiarity with computers preferred.

Those interested may come to the 9th Pier where I am docked. You can’t miss it. It’s the big blue metal ship.

NO GHOSTS

[Someone apparently had a stupid argument in a bar…]