Mission:

It was that time of week. The time that I had admittedly been looking forward to since the last time I visited. I was going to help Edina and Asida with their research. I arrived at their farm at about noon. I had no idea what their schedule was like, so I thought that this would be a time of day least likely to interrupt anything crucial. I reasoned that they would probably be winding down or just getting started back up due to the imminence of lunchtime.

I went up to the door and knocked a short knock. Just like last time, Asida opened the door.

"Oh, hi Kaitu."
"Hello Asida. How have you been?"
"Pretty good." The decently neutral expression on his face turned into one of pride and jubilation, "While you were gone, we started work on a really cool project! It's not ready for testing yet, but we've made some outstanding progress!"

At this time, Edina had come up to the door.

"Great! You're here! I thought you might have just been being polite when you said that you'd come back! Well, have no fear, we've got a couple of things for you to mess around with today!"

She rushed quickly out the door in the direction of a nearby building that looked like it was designed to be stables. Asida was in pursuit, and I took it as a request to follow her. When she opened the door to the building, it was clear that it had been converted into a workshop, with spare parts of different machines and various tools just lying around.

Edina went around a corner and, remarkably rapidly, came back with an armful of stuff, which she promptly proceeded to dump on a nearby table.

"Ok. This week, we decided to focus on water-related things."

She beckoned me over and cleared part of the table. In the cleared part, she placed a peculiar set of swords.

“These swords,” Edina explained, “are specially designed for underwater combat.”

I was wondering why they had holes in various places. I guess they somehow helped, though I wasn’t quite sure. Except it would be somewhat difficult considering that I couldn’t exactly stay underwater that long.

Seemingly by reading my mind, she then displayed a mask.

“This is something that I am particularly proud of. It allows for a ninja to stay underwater for up to thirty minutes at a time.”

She handed it to me and I felt that it was much heavier than a normal mask.

Asida, taking over the description, commented, “Thirty minutes may not be very long, but it was the best we could do with this prototype. It uses six small canisters of compressed air in a set of staggered steps to allow a continuation of breathing. Each one contains a remarkable five minutes of oxygen regulated by a small valve.”

He popped one off and showed it to me. It was a cylinder about two inches in length with a circumference of only an inch.

“How were you able to get that much air into something that small?”

His face gleamed in pride as he boasted, “I came up with a way to use chakra to bind oxygen into an incredibly dense mass of solid…well, solid oxygen. Now here is where it gets really cool: Edina-sensei came up with this awesome regulator that is able to withstand the pressure of the oxygen whilst slowly undoing the chakra bonds. You know, too much concentrated oxygen is toxic, so we had to put small amounts of other gases in there, but it’s astoundingly efficient!”

I was surprised and impressed. I had never seen Asida get that excited before. This must have come to fruition through an astounding breakthrough. I had to admit that even I was a little excited to test this thing.

Asida continued, “Additionally, we installed a pressure gauge and a wireless communications unit into the helmet. Naturally, as this is not connected to a tank, it can’t withstand a lot of pressure. Therefore you actually can’t go as deeply as we would’ve wanted.” He smiled sheepishly. “Still… it’s a lot of progress. When you reach an unsafe depth, you’ll hear a beeping noise. Don’t worry about a thing!”

Wordcount: 726/1000

When I arrived at the lake they had pointed out to me, I put on the mask. It was quite stuffy, but at least it fit. Asida had accompanied me and he gave me the thumbs up as I started descending into the depths of the lake. Ok, it was the shore, but 'descending into the depths' is how I internally monologue. I swam around for a bit, holding my breath, just in case. Finally, I let my breath go. And... I could actually breath! This was impressive.

"How's it going? I see that the first tank has been activated?" asked a disembodied Edina's voice. I had gotten so caught up in the excitement of the breathing that I had forgotten about the radio.

"The mask is working very nicely. Are you receiving this?"

There was no response. I decided to resurface. Asida was waiting with the pair of swords. I pulled off the mask and asked him if anything with the radio transmitter looked off.

"No, it looks fine. Was there a problem?"

"Yeah, I don't think Edina could hear me. I could hear her fine, but she didn't respond to my inquiry."

"Huh...weird. But the air system works?"

"Yeah! It works really well! I could actually breath semi-normally."

He looked slightly disappointed that it was only 'semi-normally', but he didn't say anything about it as he handed back the mask.

As I wasn't that experienced in bukijutsu, I felt kinda silly waving the swords around underwater, but they actually were pretty fast. However, when I tried to slice a log in half, the blades were dreadful at cutting. I re-resurfaced and reported my findings. This certainly was a fun job.

Wordcount: 292+726=1018
Mission Complete!