Shigure was lying down on the couch while Akashi was leaning back on her chair in the same counseling room two days before the sortie, Shigure taking some time off to talk to the repair ship in order to learn more about the world of ship girls.
The session was after another training session earlier that day to train them up for their first sortie, the both of them scheduling their get-together session in the late afternoon, after Shigure's training session.
Akashi was currently covering the topic about how the docks functioned and how they repaired ship girls from the inside and the outside.
The "bathtubs" of the docks were like hospital beds, with heartbeat sensors and hidden X-ray machines amongst others hidden within them to detect a ship girl's injuries and keep track of their vitals.
The specialized nano-machines that filled the bathwater would then attempt to close the wound and perform surgery on the afflicted area with available materials, restoring the ship girl body to its original state.
The walls of the bathtub were lined with little supply lines that supplied recovery materials in almost undetectable quantities to allow the nano-machines to resupply on steel and fuel, both materials essential in repairing a ship girl's body.
Akashi was quick to clarify that to them, dying and sinking meant two entirely different things.
"A ship girl can die countless times, and so long as she's able to keep her brain intact, resurrection is still possible. But the act of sinking, is, well, being sunk in battle. We can't resurrect something that can't be brought back to us."
Akashi continued as she stared at the ceiling.
"The Americans nicknamed it the Lazarus Pit, due to the seemingly supernatural properties of the bathwater to bring back dead ship girls to life, almost under any circumstances. But as they also joked, in such a godless, violent world like ours, what's the point in believing in saviors and gods when all we need is a bathtub to bring us back to life?"
She smirked at that, Shigure raising an eyebrow at how much lightly some girls took their lives to make such morbid jokes, Shigure interjecting with a question.
"So is the ship girl made up of only the mind and body?"
Akashi broke eye contact with the ceiling to give Shigure an aside glance, replying knowingly.
"Not quite. The ship girl is made up of three components which make up the Trinity, the body, the mind, and the soul.
The body is the physical form we are given, the mind helps us understand the world, granting us intelligence and sentience, and the soul is a unit of self-sustaining source of power to give life to our bodies. A ship girl's soul is an extremely powerful, flexible and adaptable power source, but a lot of things are not known about it despite its near-miraculous properties, taking on a randomized personality in every construction process."
Gesturing to Shigure, Akashi used the little destroyer as an example of the creation process to explain how a ship girl was created.
"Hence, with you as an example, when a Shigure personality is selected by luck and summoned into this world, the Fairies would then build the body of Shigure and install the soul-slash-personality into the steel body, helping your soul get adjusted to the earthly vessel. The soul generates enough power to boot up the destroyer body and creates within it the modules necessary for a ship girl to function, amongst them World War 2 memories and basic naval combat techniques suiting that of a destroyer, effectively bringing the ship girl to life with pre-programmed knowledge."
"S-So, if a ship girl were to be decapitated…"
"If the brain's still intact and the head is brought back to us, she'd likely suffer a week of physical rehabilitation after recreating the body."
"But, if the head were to be affected…"
"Then pray that you die or recover quickly.
Trust me, anything could happen.
From being perfectly fine if you're lucky and your brain adapts and recovers, to personality corruption, memory loss, constant headaches or worse."
Akashi sighed, and explained,
"Look, humans don't understand the entirety of how their brain works, and it's almost the same for us ship girls, despite everything up in here…"
Akashi pointed at her temple.
"... Being for the most part ones, zeroes, tons of program lines, and modeled after the human psyche. And besides, I'm helping you understand how the ship girl works in general, not here to give you a full-blown medical lecture-slash-philosophy lesson on the nature of the ship girl to help you get a doctorate degree."
Shigure nodded meekly in agreement, thinking about the conversation at hand and mentally going through the creation process of the ship girls,
She finally decided to ask a morbid question out of curiosity.
"I understand if our mind or our body fails under stress and injury, but can the soul fail? I-I mean, if that made any sense..."
Shigure looked a little sheepish as she tried to think of a way to clarify herself, but Akashi nodded as she answered with the bored tone of an experienced doctor explaining bodily functions to a child, seemingly dulled by her life's experiences and almost unfazed by what she was talking about.
"With the three aspects of the ship girl, there come the three stresses, psychological stress for the mind, physical stress for the body, and emotional stress for the soul. The constant stress from battles, the ever-present threat of death, and the less-than-pleasant memories of World War 2 will wear down the mind.
The repeated destruction and subsequent recovery from life-threatening injuries may cause the body to weaken and break down from needing to be replaced so many times. The inevitable loss of comrades and sister ships along with the very dangerous possibility of a fatalistic attitude seeping in would take a toll on your soul, warping the soul and causing a negative change within you. And since the soul powers your body and mind, what do you think will happen to you when you fall into despair and lose heart? Well, I suppose when we gain the ability to understand our pasts and experience life's ups and downs, it also helps when we can communicate with one another and express our joys and sorrows.
It's just..."
Shigure noted the slightly saddened expression, or at least Akashi being a little more sad than usual as she explained to Shigure.
"I'm just one repair ship, and I can't help everyone with their problems. Especially since ship girls, much like humans, sometimes refuse all help when they need it most and make things difficult for me. Because of that, I sometimes have to delegate the responsibility of helping them to a ship girl who's in a better position to help them with their issues. And as you might expect, I absolutely dislike this method as I can't personally talk to them, which greatly increases the possibility of miscommunication and making things worse."
Shigure had a good idea of where this was going, and Shigure looked towards the repair ship as she cautiously asked.
"Let me guess. You want me to talk to someone, right?"
Akashi nodded as she met Shigure's gaze, answering honestly.
"Well, it was quite a coincidence that you wanted to find me, because I wanted to find you and ask you to talk to a fellow ship girl who tried to bury her pain after a ship girl close to her sank."
Shigure winced at that, now extremely intrigued and concerned about the ship girl in question, Shigure understanding the feelings of pain and loneliness that could overwhelm ship girls who weren't mentally prepared to face and deal with these turbulent thoughts and feelings.
Akashi's gaze softened as she saw the helpfulness and sincerity reflected in Shigure's eyes, asking Shigure about a certain destroyer in the 2nd Fleet.
"What do you know about Shimakaze?"