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"If you want to get familiar with the Commander, maybe you should try going out drinking," Galatea suggested.
"Is this your horoscopes again?" Arethusa asked- with good reason. Her sister had been given a column by Oriani and would not shut up about it.
"It's… facts? The Commander does go drinking with the girls on Friday. Sometimes, you've just got to give fate a nudge." She smiled. "Oh, that's good!" She continued to scribble away on the paper.
"What am I, fodder for your column?"
"We're all just pawns of fate, Arethusa~" Galatea crooned, barely managing to keep a straight face.
"Yeah, yeah." Arethusa sighed. "So… drinking? I've never really done it before... should I get advice?" She ignored any snort Galatea might have given at the thought of Arethusa asking how to drink.
Now, if there was any faction on the base synonymous with alcohol in Arethusa's mind, it was the Russians. (Northern Parliament, whatever. Anyone with a functioning brain could draw the connections.) Now, was it stereotyping to think of the Russians as a gaggle of vodka guzzlers? Probably, but most of them didn't particularly seem to care about breaking the stereotype…
She found her target in the form of Grozny. Sure, there were others who drank- Volga, Aurora, Gangut, Sevastopol, do you see the issue- but Grozny was a bit more Arethusa's size. That impacted the absorption of booze, as she understood it, even if Arethusa knew her comparative tolerance was laughable.
When she arrived, Grozny had already picked up a decent head of steam. "Oh, hello. You're…"
"Treaty cruiser Arethusa, of Arethusa class. I'd, uh, like to have a drink?"
Grozny's eyes lit up. "Of course! Sit down, sit down!" She rushed off and returned with booze- happily sipping at one bottle as she set the others down- before she ran off to get more. Arethusa managed to stop her after the second trip to… whatever stockpile was used to keep the Russian booze. (Was it bold of her to assume it was just the one…?)
"Isn't this… a bit much?"
"No," she breathed fumes strong enough to light with a match, "you must reject bourgeois conceptions of drinking and alcohol, Comrade Arethusa- the capitalists don't want you binge drinking!" She said that as if it somehow made binge drinking a good thing.
Now, Arethusa was no politician, but… "Wouldn't buying booze only line the pockets of said capitalists? Wouldn't they prefer the workers drunk and docile instead of sober and revolutionary?"
Grozny blinked, looked at her bottle, and blinked again. She turned away from Arethusa and rushed off shouting. "Comrades! COMRADES!"
Whoops? She took a sip of the provided drinks before she left, and… eugh. It felt like her throat was on fire.
Assuming the Russians could pry themselves from their cups, Arethusa might have caused a real problem. Still, she had at least one monstrous Muscovite hangover between herself and the consequences of her actions, which was plenty of time, really.
Anyways, she decided to get a slightly more… capitalist view of drinking. The Commander was American, after all, so some hint of her drinking culture might be interesting…? It was something Arethusa could do instead of drinking her rum ration alone like some sort of loser, so she 'moseyed on over', to use the native parlance.
But how would she open? "Hey, would you like to share a drink?" Was that too forward? Still, she would look like a total dork if she wandered around the American section of the base all day, not doing a damned thing…
"Hey there!"
"What do you want?" Arethusa snapped, immediately feeling like a bit of a heel as Nevada frowned.
"You just looked a little lost, is all, but if you can handle yourself-"
"No!" Arethusa yelped, feeling like more and more of a tool by the second but refusing to back down. "I, uh- would you- do you have any drinks?"
Nevada snorted. "Can't you have a drink with your proper Royal Navy friends?"
"I wanted to… branch out!" Perfectly reasonable excuse.
The battleship's eyes narrowed, and for a moment Arethusa wondered how she could have possibly offended Nevada, who would clearly blow her clean out of the water… eventually, she seemed to nod to herself.
Nevada looked around for a couple of moments, before leaning in close. "Can you keep a secret? Even from little miss Liz?" It took her a moment or two to realize just who Nevada was referring to, and Arethusa's face colored.
"I would never hide a secret from her majesty!" Arethusa immediately rattled off the party line, before noticing the look Nevada was giving her. "But perhaps, just this once…"
"Perfect. Now, I've got some friends who'd really prefer this staying a secret, alright, hun?" Nevada made some vague gestures in the direction of other American battleships, and Arethusa suddenly felt that betraying whatever trust she had gained would be a monumentally bad idea. What sort of potentially booze-related scheme were they brewing here?
(And when exactly had she leveled up to hun?)
She looked around Nevada's deck, noting the differences between her and the British battleships that Arethusa was slightly more familiar with. Really, the realities of war weren't that different between the two nations, so there was nothing to write home about… the inside of the ship wasn't that different either.
"Here we are!" Nevada exclaimed, standing before something that definitely shouldn't have been on a battleship.
"This is a torpedo," Arethusa noted, not entirely sure if these Yanks were all right in the head.
"This is a torpedo- propelled by 180-proof alcohol. Nine-tenths alcohol by volume, Arethusa. It's the good stuff."
"That can't be safe."
"It isn't!" Before Arethusa could start wondering if these girls were more than just a touch mad, Nevada grabbed something from a nearby box. "We dilute it with pineapple juice!"
"That's certainly a mixed drink." Maybe it was a little silly of her to expect high class from the Americans… was this the sort of thing the Yanks usually pulled? The one with the bunny ears seemed to be drunk more often than not, swaying like a reed in the wind. She was so lost in thought she barely caught anything more than the last word of Nevada's sentence.
"...fruity?"
"Huh? No, I'm not-"
"Do you want it fruity?" Nevada clarified.
"Oh, ah… whatever you think is good."
"Right." Nevada mixed in a lot of pineapple juice before giving her a glass.
"Thank you." Arethusa nodded, before taking a sip. "I can barely taste the booze. I think I can handle something a little stronger." There had to be a comfortable step somewhere between fruit juice and paint stripper, right?
"If you're sure…" Nevada said, pouring out another glass.
"More, I insist." Seeing Nevada's questioning look, Arethusa's cheeks heated. "What, do you think I can't handle it?"
(She got a little… no, a lot squawky when she got worked up like this.)
With her taste buds thoroughly traumatized by a potent mix of grain alcohol and pineapple juice- sans poison, thankfully- Arethusa decided she needed something a bit more high-class. Something refined. Something delicate. Something French.
Fortunately for her, there was something of an event going on. One of the Americans- California, maybe- had managed to get some of the French girls to do some wine tasting. That sounded very promising: refined, moderate women who would savor the drinks.
Unfortunately, her preoccupations with 'torpedo juice' meant that she didn't get to see the beginning of the taste tasting… instead, she opened the door near the end, as the Iris Libre girls blabbed on and on about the obviously superior mouthfeel and tannins of the winning wine. The French wine.
California smirked. "Well, that's funny… because your fancy French taste buds chose a Napa valley wine every time."
There was, for a moment, silence.
"YOU AMERICANS WOULDN'T KNOW A GOOD VINTAGE IF YOU BIT YOU ON YOUR OVERSIZED DERRIERES-"
Arethusa shut the door and decided to try her luck with the Italians.
(The signorinas of Sardegna were, thankfully, a little more relaxed. Or perhaps they didn't get into big drag-out fights with the Yanks in places where Arethusa could bear witness to them.)
Considering her… recent experiences with alcohol, she wasn't quite as acclimated to drinking as she had hoped, even if she had gotten slightly better when it came to operating in the presence of the drunk. Still, the port's bar was a bit of a shock. Eugen was being Eugen, the Germans were being Germans, the Yanks Yanks.
It was… something.
"Howdy, Arethusa."
"Commander!" Arethusa jumped, turning to see the Commander, her hair down and a smile on her face.
"Easy, girl. We're off duty."
"We should never let our guards down completely!"
"Well, how about you keep watch next to me?" The Commander suggested, patting the seat next to her.
"If you insist," Arethusa said, trying not to grab the seat too aggressively. She knew not looking overeager wouldn't save her from Akagi's furious glare, but Arethusa had a reputation to uphold!
"What are… what are you getting?" Arethusa asked. She just… didn't know what was good. That was it.
The Commander smiled, and sort of gestured at a manjuu. "Two virgin mojitos, please."
"Virgin?"
"No alcohol." The Commander laughed. "Someone looks relieved."
"That's- uh, that's-"
"You don't need a reason. I mean sure, I've got one, but you don't need one."
"What's your reason, then?"
"I'm something like a designated driver, I think. Would you let any of these dorks touch booze unsupervised?"
Arethusa snorted. "Of course not!"
"Do you know what Gangut said to me once?"
"What?"
The Commander put on a painfully thick accent. "I don't think of it as a drinking problem, comrade. I think of it as a drinking solution."
"What exactly is a drinking solution?"
"The way you hear them talk, you'd think alcohol is better than a heater. I've tried to tell them it actually makes you colder, but they're not buying it."
(Huh. Maybe Arethusa needed some booze, then. Something about the bar had her feeling a little warm. Maybe it was Akagi's fiery gaze.)
"Still, I think there is a place for it. Social lubricant, and all. I mean, I'd need a bit of Dutch courage to even think about wearing that leotard," she laughed.
…
"I mean, it's not bad," the Commander doubled back as Arethusa's face gained a fascinating scarlet hue, "in fact, it looks really great on you-"
…
Arethusa wondered if this feeling was what happened when the soul left the body. If so, could Erebus hurry up and escort her to the Great Beyond already?