“This is way too dodgy.” On guard, Naruto began down the stairs on quiet feet.
He found a sliding door at the bottom of the stairs, and when he opened it, he saw a large Japanese-style room with tatami mats on the floor. A kettle hanging from a pothook was whistling over a small sunken fireplace. There was a tea caddy on a low tray table, and tea leaves for one had been set out inside the overturned lid. Someone had clearly been in the middle of boiling water for tea.
“What is this place …”
The smoke from the fireplace was escaping to the outside through a vent, and what appeared to be a fire alarm was affixed to a fat joist on the ceiling. The modern fixture had at some point been installed in the old traditional space. He could sense someone hiding on the other side of the sliding doors further back in the room.
Naruto considered how to draw out the person from behind the door without alarming them when the door slid open.
“Intruder! Ready yourself!” A young woman in a coverall apron came flying out.
Kashunk!
He heard the sound of a scientific ninja tool, and a ball of flames roared to life to fill the small room. Naruto leaped up onto the joist to handily dodge it, and then dropped down behind the woman and plucked away the scientific ninja tool.
“Be careful,” he told her. “You’ll set the place on fire.”
“Let go! You came to steal my research data, didn’t you?!” With her wrist in Naruto’s hand, the woman struggled and kicked like a mouse caught in a trap. “You dirty coward! Just let me go! You—! You!”
Belatedly, the fire alarm began to ring shrilly, and sprinklers in the ceiling began to spray water over the room.
“Well, I did come in without asking, so there’s that.” Feeling guilty, Naruto let go of her wrist, and the woman not only did not try to run away, she grabbed a pen from the pocket of her apron.
“You! Youuuuuuu!”
She came at him with it, swinging wildly. She had her eyes closed, so she didn’t seem to catch on that Naruto was easily sidestepping her would-be blows.
“You came to steal my data! Isn’t that right?!”
What is with this woman?
She attacked relentlessly for a full five minutes until she finally realized that it was the Seventh Hokage she was facing and regained a modicum of calm.
“I am so terribly sorry. I just misunderstood. My name is Ameno Chihare. I’m a scientist from the Land of Fire. My specialization is astrophysics.” The woman bowed at the Hokage as she introduced herself.
The room had become thoroughly drenched from the kerfuffle. The water she’d boiled was completely cold now, after being showered in sprinkler water. Naruto and Chihare sat formally on their knees on the damp tatami mats and waited for the kettle to come to a boil over the fireplace once more.
“I scared you by just walking in here,” Naruto said.
“No, my behavior was inexcusable,” she responded. “I never imagined it would be the Seventh Hokage who came to take my research data.”
“No, actually, you’ve got the wrong idea,” he protested, exhausted, and looked up toward the stairs. “But why’re you doing research or whatever in a place like this? Going to all the trouble of hiding this room with a liquid crystal wall. Those things are expensive, you know.”
“I made it myself, so it didn’t cost very much at all.” Chihare took the boiling kettle off of the pothook and poured hot water into the teapot as she continued. “The liquid crystal wall is my design.”
“Huh?” Naruto blinked rapidly in surprise. “So then you’re a scientist at Kengakuin? What are you doing down here?”
“I wanted an environment where I could concentrate on my experiments alone,” she said. “This house belongs to Director Furieh. He renovated the basement for research purposes, and I’ve been borrowing it.”
It must have been some seriously important research if the basement had to be renovated.
Naruto looked around the room. “The truth is, I came here because I saw chakra leaking out from where this basement is. I was worried something dangerous might be going on. What’s this research you’re doing?”
“Chakra is visible to you?” Chihare asked.
When Naruto explained about the function of the goggles, she nodded in understanding.
“I see. The chakra you observed most likely leaked out from my lab further back.”
“Which is why I asked what experiment—” Naruto was cut off.
“It would actually be quicker for you to take a look.” She set the kettle down on the tatami mat, stood up, and pulled open a double door built into the other end of the Japanese-style room. “This is my lab.”
Naruto’s jaw dropped.
Shelves lined the forty-five-square-meter room from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. Petri dishes were crammed into every available space on every single shelf. There were maybe hundreds, even thousands of them. The sight of so many items the same size in the same place was quite impressive and somewhat disturbing.
“These petri dishes contain liquefied chakra,” Chihare told him. “My mission is to create a pluripotent chakra applicator.”
“Pluri …” Naruto stared at her blankly.
“It’s an experiment to change chakra into other substances artificially.”
She picked up one of the petri dishes and shook it gently as she continued.
“Don’t you think chakra’s quite mysterious? It can become anything at all. It can be wind, fire, earth, water, electricity. Depending on the person, it can be transformed into lava or rubber even. Recently, some ninja have changed the component elements included in dirt with Earth Style to make glass and gemstones. There is no other energy that can change into such diverse forms.”
“Hmm. I guess, yeah.” The phenomenon of transforming chakra was so innate to Naruto that he’d never thought too hard about it before. But now that she mentioned it, she was exactly right.
“It has the potential to transform into anything according to the user,” she continued. “If we could control this nature of the chakra scientifically … For instance, what if we could turn chakra into a valuable natural resource or precious metals? Don’t you think there would be plenty of societal good in that?”
Developing a new energy source?