Redemption

Preparations (Old Version)

"Alright, see you soon." He said and stood up from his chair just as I walked out and closed the door.

As the water pipes rumbled overhead, I prepared a simple but nutritious breakfast, some cooked sausages and over-easy eggs with a side of mixed fruit and as the toaster popped open, Alex came walking down with his jacket slung over his shoulder and his cap in his hand, his hair still wet from his shower but loosely styled.

"Feel any better?" I asked him.

"Much," he responded, "though still a little sore."

"Well maybe some breakfast will help ease your pain." I told him and placed his plate in front of his seat before setting my own down and getting started on it.

We ate in silence for a little bit occasionally passing comments about the weather and anything else upcoming on our schedule before I remembered what I wanted to ask him.

"By the way, what was it that had you working for so long last night?"

"Oh, well it was um... something I wanted to do regarding our recent recruit."

"I figured that much but from the looks of it, it seemed to do less with what we're trying to do for her now and more with what happened to her."

He stammered a short bit before answering, "W-Well, when she first arrived and we learned who she was, I tried informing Admiral Ferguson about it as per regulation regarding newly summoned ship girls without the aid or knowledge of the United States."

"Mhm."

"But when I told him that the ship girl recovered was the Ourang Medan, he started getting quiet, even a little hostile before hanging up on me."

My eyebrows raised and I'm sure that I was wearing a confused yet suspicious look on my face, I had met Admiral Ferguson several times before with Alex and each time he seemed easy to get along with and perfectly friendly, not at all like the person Alex was describing.

He must have had the same thought because he followed my confusion with; "Exactly. I was off-put by it too so I thought that the only thing to do would be to try and look up why he may have reacted that way."

"I tried calling every higher up I knew and each one reacted almost the same way, one even questioned if I was taking something so I tried looking beyond them and onto reasons why the Ourang Medan went missing in the first place and some of the theories regarding its disappearance."

"And even though many of the theories seemed completely bogus, from extra-terrestrial beings to giant squids, a number of them followed a certain specific story. A military ship carrying some type of secret cargo named the Ourang Medan goes missing with the last message ever being sent saying the words 'I die.' A recovery ship goes out to try and recover any survivors but finds instead the whole crew dead and in a state of absolute fear, so they try to tow the ship away but something inside catches fire and explodes and the ship sinks with all hands lost."

"And? What's that supposed to mean."

"It means that out of all the theories, this is the most reasonable and logical one and since we all now know that there was a real Ourang Medan, we have to ask if any of these theories have any real claim and obviously they do so we have to ask ourselves, what else was real and what happened to the original ship?"

He certainly made some good points, and it did raise some questions like 'what else was real about those theories' but those thoughts were interrupted when I took notice of the time, 8:30.

"Well, maybe you can work on this a bit more when we get back, but not too hard, alright." I told him and walked over with my empty plate.

He looked over at the clock and went wide-eyed for a short moment before chuckling a bit and placing his empty plate on-top of mine, "Right, right. Sorry, I guess I lost track of the time."