savaster
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FMS Episode One 24
🕑 Added 2024-01-14 13:00:04 +0000 UTCAya's hand touched down on the white sandy bottom forty meters deep. A fluff of dust swirled up and disturbed some little fish with spiny fins out of their hideouts in the sand. The enormous dark red hull of Yaeyama Maru loomed in front of Aya, resting on the bottom with a slight lean to one side. Aya looked up and squinted, and after noting the gap that led to inside the ship, she approached with swift strokes and kicks along the sea bottom like she was diving in a shallow twenty-five meter pool. The loose sand particles occasionally touched her lips and nostrils that have long ceased to take in air.
The gap, about one meter across, was from when Yaeyama Maru collided with another ship from her small convoy during this spring’s sea storm. While the other ship managed to limp back to the north reef, Yaeyama Maru was badly damaged and sank, sitting where she was until this day.
Without hesitation, Aya swam in through the opening and made a re-entry into the flooded section of the ship. She was in an empty bulk, with no portholes and almost pitch dark.
Aya treaded water for a while, managing her buoyancy so that she would not drift up or down. She then made out the position of the gap where she entered and started to swim across toward the bulk’s farthest end. She recalled that there was an open hatch in that area that would lead up the lower deck where Chihaya’s air-tight cabin was. Aya eventually made her way to the far end and felt and grasped the rusted ladder bars that were bolted onto the back wall. If she crawled up, her head should easily pass through the hatch and emerge onto the lower deck.
Except that it didn’t.
Comments
savaster
After the initial writing I became a licensed scuba diver and found that these depths were not as forbidding as I presumed to be. For example, the water pressure can be comfortably accommodated if you can equalize, and the water temperature barely drops in Okinawa seas despite the depth (which is different if you were diving in still water like a lake)
umibuta
I am a bit curious about you seem to making the depth of their dive double of the original story? I remember in the old Japanese text it was 15m when Chihaya started to panic when she entered the wreck the first time, and now it's 30m. Again it was 20m in the old Japanese when you mentioned Aya touching the sand at the bottom of sea, and now it is 40m.
Titan1017
Was it ever explained what Aya was trying to do here? Was it simply a matter of showing off to her older cousin, since if so she really had no need to push herself this far; Chihaya’s already intrigued. I do hope that later in the story we get a better description of the kind of training regime Aya puts her cousin through, as I can only really recall them sitting on the mast of the ship between their first dive (this one), and the near fatal one later. Hopefully we get some more illustrations too.
Didrik Svahn
I remember this hatch and how it caused issues for the cousins :D
