"Great," Hazō said, smiling. "Okay, there's just one more thing I wanted to talk about. Or, rather, one more person."
Noburi frowned in confusion for a moment and then his eyes went wide. "Please don't say it, please don't say it..." he mumbled.
"Mori Ami."
"Noooo!"
"Chill out, Nobby. Ami is in town and we need to have her in our plans. Mari, what can you tell me about her? Any insights into her mind? Can we trust her?"
Mari sat up, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and a truly disturbing smile on her face. "Oh, yes," she said quietly. "Yes, you can trust her. She's not going to work against us, and if she tries...well, then I'll just have to
very politely ask her to pretty please with sugar on top cut it out."
"I...see."
"You realize she's important to Keiko, right?" Noburi asked nervously. "Hurting her would be bad."
"Why, Noburi! I'm shocked that you would think such a thing of me! All I said was that I would ask her—I even specified that I'd be polite about it. I'm not sure what more you could want."
"Yeeaaaaahhhh...."
"Moving on," Hazō said, "On a silly note, what do you think of me hanging up this sign by the door?" He held up the prepared sign:
Any Mori Ami who sneaks through our defenses unassisted to show off (as judged by Mari) cedes us another favour (-_^)/~~."
Mari chuckled. "I don't know that she would honor it, but I don't see any harm."
"Cool. And, on the subject of Ami favors, I have a favor banked with Ami. Should I use it now, or hold onto it?"
Mari cocked her head. "Huh. Interesting question. Could go either way, but I tend to suggest using it now if you actually have something worthwhile."
"A couple, yeah. I was thinking 'Maximize the political power of the Gōketsu'." He started to add his other idea ('Maximize my personal social skill') but decided not to say that to the woman who had literally spent years helping him work on social skills. "That would be the best one, I think."
Mari pursed her lips. "You'd need to put a time frame on it to make it fit within a reasonable favor. Maybe something like 'For the next month, have as your highest priority the maximizing of Gōketsu's political power.' And also suggest to her that working with me would be a good choice on that front."
Hazō grinned. "Eeeexcellent. I shall do exactly that." He flipped his hand palm up to indicate a changing topic. "Speaking of working with you, I've been thinking how restricted we are on manpower. We need to adopt some people, and that has financial and legal applications."
He looked around, catching the eye of everyone in the room to make sure they were included. "Over the last few days, I've been spending a ton of time dealing with paperwork at the Tower in order to deal with tax crap. It's been...interesting. Keiko would probably have known this stuff, and you guys may or may not, but bear with me while I lay it out, just so we're all on the same page. First though—Akane, what is your experience with taxes?"
His erstwhile apprentice shrugged. "Simple enough. Your first forty-two thousand four hundred ryō are untaxed. After that, we pay eighty percent on all missions, taken at the time of payment. If I do a mission worth a thousand ryō, I actually collect two hundred."
"What about your equipment draw?"
"What about it? Once a month, I can go to the Tower and choose whatever gear I want up to a certain value. It's not much—usually I get a couple of explosive tags. How is that taxes?"
"It's reverse taxation, effectively. The Tower is paying you money for being a ninja. What about the clans? Do they pay the same taxes?"
She nodded, confused. "Of course. The Will of Fire requires no less."
Hazō nodded, lips pursed sourly. "Brace yourself, because this is going to be a bumpy ride.
"First, the tax code is almost impenetrable, but when you burrow down it turns out that there's eight groups for tax purpose: the rural farmers, the urban farmers, the nobility, the Daimyo, the Hokage, the founding clans of Leaf, the non-founding clans plus clanless jōnin, and clanless non-jōnin ninja. These groups get put in three separate lanes for tax purposes.
"The shortest lane goes from the ninja to the Hokage. Next shortest is urbanites, meaning the people who live in Leaf, Otafuku Gai, Keishi, and Tanzaku Gai. They pay taxes to the Daimyō of the Land of Fire, who then pays essentially all of it to the Hokage. Finally, there's the rural farmers. They aren't actually all farmers—it includes everyone who lives in the villages. A good example is that place in Iron we went through where Noburi fixed the kid's gapmouth. Some were farmers, some were fisherfolk, some were craftsman, but they would all be classed as farmers for tax purposes. The tax rate is basically 'everything you have after subsistence.' That money gets paid to the local noble who holds their land. The noble then pays the vast majority of that money up the chain to the Daimyō of Fire, who pays nearly all of it to the Hokage. In all cases, the Hokage keeps some of it for himself, assigns some to the Tower as a discretionary budget, and then gives the rest to the clans and clanless jōnin in various forms." He started to continue, then paused. "For convenience, I'm just going to roll the clans and clanless jōnin together into 'the clans' and 'the clanless' just means genin and chūnin.
"First, the clans receive a monthly stipend from the Tower, conditional only on the clan continuing to live in Leaf and 'conduct themselves in accord with the military leadership of the Hokage and the pursuit of health and wealth for Leaf and the Land of Fire'. It's paid directly to the Clan Head and can be distributed to the clan members as living allowance, plowed into various investments, or whatever.
"That stipend is about ten percent of what the clans actually receive. The rest of it comes in the form of conditional payments. For example, we receive a fifty percent bonus to mission pay. Akane, that thousand-ryō mission that netted you two hundred ryō? Now that you're a clan ninja, that mission is worth fifteen hundred. Furthermore, the taxes are refunded."
Akane's eyes went wide. "What?"
Hazō nodded. "Yeah. You'll still only collect the same two hundred ryō at the time you do the mission, but in the next month's non-conditional payment we will receive an extra five hundred ryō as the bonus pay, plus the eight hundred ryō that you paid for taxes. Basically, doing missions is no better for you as a clanless or clan ninja, but as your Clan Head I have incentive to make sure you're doing missions as much as possible until we hit the cap on our benefits."
"That..." Akane started, then stopped as she realized she had no idea what to say. "That...makes sense, I suppose? I mean, it's important that Leaf ninja be motivated to show their youth...."
Hazō shrugged. "Letting them keep their pay seems like a more direct motivation to me. The existing system just hides the fact that clanless ninja are getting screwed. Still, it is what it is.
"In addition to the stipend, the bonus pay, and the tax refunds, the clans get a much larger equipment draw than clanless do. There's a few other things, but those are usually pretty minor. The key point is that everything except the stipend is conditional on us actually doing missions, so we'll need to weigh expected value.
"The last piece of the puzzle is how the money is divided. The eight founding clans of Leaf—Senju, Hyūga, Uchiha, Aburame, Inuzuka, Nara, Akimichi, and Yamanaka—receive seventy percent of the distribution, with the remaining thirty percent being divided between all the other clans and the clanless jōnin. Incidentally, this is why the 'special jōnin' rank exists, and why most special jōnin are clanless. Promoting someone all the way to jōnin means they get a slice of a fixed-size pie, so everyone else gets less. Promoting them to
special jōnin means that they are eligible for jōnin-rank missions but don't get the shinies.
"Anyway, within each group, the money is paid based on ninja headcount. As a non-founding clan, we have a maximum award of about seventy-six hundred ryō per ninja each month. Ten percent of that is straight cash up front, the rest is the conditional payments. There's no carryover, so any money that we don't manage to claim is lost."
"By headcount out of a fixed pie," Noburi said, nodding. "So when Keiko became a Nara, some of our allotment moved to them. And when we adopted Akane, all of the other non-founding clans lost money."
"Exactly. As an aside, the thing with Keiko was complicated by the fact that she was moving from a non-founding clan to a founding clan. I suspect that that sort of thing is frowned upon, but it happens. The bit with adopting Akane is more significant. Because it cuts into everyone else's income, there's a rule that no clan may add more than two clanless ninja to its ranks per year, by any means—adoption, marriage, anything. Which is a nice piece of multi-purpose law; it prevents the stipend from getting thinned out, forces clanless ninja to compete as hard as possible for adoption, and prevents any clan from increasing its combat power too quickly. At the same time, it says nothing about ninja moving between clans—that's zero-sum and doesn't affect anyone else, so clans can intermarry and inter-adopt as much as they want. It means they don't need to worry about their blood thinning."
"This seems unfair," Akane said, her voice the very epitome of illusions shattering.
"Yeah," Hazō said. "I'm sorry, Akane. This isn't publicized—I had to dig through tax forms and papers to figure it all out—but it isn't secret either. I suspect that you would have found it all out if you had spent the last couple years in Leaf instead of with us."
"Oh, Sage," Akane said, blanching. "You can only adopt two ninja and you wasted one slot on—"
"Stop," Hazō declared, holding up one hand imperiously. "You were the first pick no matter what, and none of us have the slighest regret that we chose you."
"He's right, sis," Noburi said, leaning over so he could reach out and poke Akane's shoulder. "There was never any question."
"Of course you were the first pick," Kagome-sensei said, sounding affronted. "Who else?"
"Put those thoughts aside, Akane," Mari said, the words gentle but still an order. "There wasn't even the need for discussion. Focus on who we adopt next."
"What about Academy students?" Noburi asked. "They aren't ninja yet, right?"
Hazō shook his head. "I'm pretty sure that we aren't going to be able to work around this one, Nobs. We're messing with the livelihood of two dozen ninja clans, who collectively have a controlling voting block on the Clan Council. They aren't going to take kindly to shenanigans by an upstart clan of ragamuffins and mutts."
"But—"
"Seriously, man. If
I'm the one saying we shouldn't play silly buggers, what does that tell you?"
"Yeah, okay, fine. What about clanless jōnin? They're already getting a slice of the pie, so adopting them doesn't have any tax implications. Or do they continue to draw their own share after joining a clan, so they're double-dipping?"
Hazō hesitated. "I'd need to check, but I'm pretty sure that clanless jōnin are treated as single-member clans for tax purposes. If they join another clan then the money that was going to their 'previous clan'—meaning them as an individual—now goes to the clan they just joined."
"So they aren't motivated to join a clan," Mari said. "It involves giving up direct control of their income."
"I think so. Like I said, I'd need to check. I read until I thought my eyes would bleed, but there's a lot there."
"Okay," Noburi said. "So we're unlikely to be able to get a jōnin for our one remaining slot. What are we looking for?"
"I suspect there's only a couple dozen jōnin left in Leaf, regardless," Mari said. "And they are probably nearly all clan ninja. Being chosen to go to the Exams was a major win, even just for people who would be standing guard. Jiraiya had to carefully balance who he brought so as not to offend any of the clans. He ended up bringing a notable number of clanless jōnin and senior chūnin to Mist, and all of them died except Kurenai and Kazusa. Anko is still around, so we could talk to her, but she is politically problematic and disrespectful of authority."
"Maybe Kabuto?" Noburi suggested. "I'm assuming he's a jōnin. I've never actually asked."
"Even if he is, I'm not sure why he'd want to join," Hazō said. "Right now he has a very short command chain and major funding separate from his jōnin stipend, assuming he gets one. We don't have a lot to offer him. Personally, my thoughts go like this:
"First, we should see about adopting more civilians. People with political and financial skills who can take some load off Mari. Maybe teenagers who could be trained up. We should also acquire operatives—civilians whom we pay with money, favors, or training, but don't actually adopt. Being separate from us lets them do things that we couldn't do directly, being connected to us gives them funds and opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise. Mari, can you handle that?"
"Of course. I'll need a budget."
"Put a proposal together, leave it on my desk. Now, as far as our remaining slot for ninja adoption, we should focus on scouting clanless non-jōnin who complement our existing skills. Me, Kagome-sensei, Noburi, and arguably Mari are all support types—seals, seals, medic, and infiltration, respectively. We all punch pretty hard, but we aren't combat specialists. Akane, you're the exception." He grinned and rubbed his shoulder ruefully. "Based on the last time we sparred, you hit like a falling building. If the clan needs to fight, we'll all be on the line, but you're going to be the tip of the spear. It might be smart to get another combat specialist who can back you up."
"You're thinking about Lee again, aren't you?" Noburi said with a snort. "I swear, I think you're crushing on him."
"I'm not! He's a powerful fighter and he may or may not end up being the Turtle Summoner. If he is, he would be desirable even if he were a complete invalid. You've seen how useful the Pangolin contract was. Imagine if we had a clan of super-tough, super-strong fighters who moved ridiculously fast thanks to Lightning jutsu—that's how Jiraiya described them in the letter he left me. If they could teach us those speed-enhancing jutsu, that would be great. Only Mari and Kagome-sensei can use Lightning Element, but—"
"What do you mean?! Why do you think I—" Kagome-sensei trailed off. "You're right," he said after a few seconds. "I'm Lightning Element. I grew up in, in, uh...in Cloud. Before I...before I went into the s-school...." The words were choked away and he had to swallow several times, brushing gathering tears from his eyes. He was shivering slightly despite the heat of the room.
Mari shifted over to sit beside him and rub his back. "It's okay," she said quietly. "You're safe. You're here with your family, in our very well-defended house. Those people and places are far away and they can't hurt you." She offered him a handkerchief from one pocket. He took it gratefully and blew his nose, then wiped the tears from his eyes and cleared his throat again.
"I'm thinking of making some hot chocolate," Mari said. "Would you come help me?"
"Sure."
The two exited the room, Mari with an arm around the taller man's waist and Kagome-sensei with an arm around her shoulders.
Hazō sighed, debating the right thing to do. Mari had extricated Kagome-sensei from the conversation, so clearly she thought he needed to be semi-alone right now. Running after them was therefore contraindicated. Discussing the issue with those in the room smacked of talking about the man behind his back...best to simply plunge ahead.
"On the previous topic," he said, "I'm leaning towards a combat specialist and if we can get a Summoner then definitely do that."
"There are a lot of scrolls suddenly without Summoners," Akane observed, clearly grateful to move away from the topic of what had just happened. "Captains Kakashi and Gai had Dog and Turtle respectively. Orochimaru had Snakes. All of those are currently in the Tower?"
"As far as I know," Hazō replied. "Allocating the Snake scroll is going to be a major issue as soon as there's a Hokage. I would hope that Captains Kakashi and Gai left their scrolls to someone. Lee would be an obvious candidate for the Turtle scroll."
Akane shook her head. "Lee is a pure taijutsu specialist because his chakra control is awful. I very much doubt he could become a Summoner. Still, simply possessing the scroll would give him tremendous value as a potential adoptee, so Gai may have left it to him specifically to ensure that he was taken care of. Failing that...I'm not sure."
"What about Kakashi?" Noburi asked. "I was on that one mission with him. He talked a lot but didn't say much, if you know what I mean. I have no idea who his friends were. Did you know him?"
"No. He was quite reserved and had few close social ties. The Dog scroll may be waiting for allocation like the Snake scroll is."
"Seems likely to me that ISC are going to put serious effort into getting it for themselves," Hazō noted. "Yamanaka would be the obvious choice; the Akimichi are already bruisers, the Nara shadow jutsu are fast enough and versatile enough that they can take care of themselves in a fight, but the Yamanaka are much less combat-capable. Plus, the Dogs are apparently varied enough that they would benefit the alliance as a whole, not just as fighters."
"I am so glad I'm not the one who has to deal with that," Noburi said with a grin. "I'll think about you while you're in the Council chamber and I'm...oh, let's say lollygagging in bed, or lounging in front of the fire while toasting marshmallows and eating chocolate."
"You realize that, as your Clan Head, I can assign you to specific missions, right? Like, say, D-rank missions cleaning up the Academy kitchens?"
"Pah," Noburi replied, waving the threat aside. "The optics on that would be terrible, and you can't afford to publicly sully our name like that."
Hazō eyed him coldly.
After a moment, Noburi's confident smirk slipped. "It really would look bad, Hazō," he said. "I mean, a Gōketsu working as a menial in public? Terrible for the image, right? Akane, back me up here."
"Leave me out of this, Noburi," Akane said, smiling and raising her hands in disavowal. "You picked this fight, you can settle it."
Noburi mumbled something under his breath that sounded a lot like 'traitor', but then gave Hazō another nervous smile. "Heheh...we're good, right, Hazō?"
After a few seconds, Hazō allowed his face to unfreeze and nodded, carefully keeping his expression sober and not allowing the glee to shine forth. It had worked! All those hours practicing in the mirror to replicate Keiko's Scary Face had paid off! He couldn't do the 'make the room actually feel physically colder and filled with terror and despair' thing, but he was making progress!
"We're good," he said instead. "Anyway, I think we've pretty much exhausted the topics I had. Noburi, you're still assigned to finding us good adoption candidates. Yukari, Kenta, work on expanding your business and setting up that construction company. Finish up the budget ASAP and put it on my desk."
"Yes, sir," Kenta said, bowing from a seated position.
"It's just 'Hazō'. Akane, talk to Lady Tsunade for me. See if she is intending to vote. Tell her that the Gōketsu are interested in funding her medical work, and are considering setting up a hospital outside of Leaf sometime in the next year. It's an idea, not a plan, and I'd like to get her thoughts if and when it's convenient for her."
"Absolutely, justHazō," his ex-girlfriend said, with that brilliant smile that still tugged at his heart.
It was a good thing that the Iron Nerve could flawlessly show only the emotion that you chose to show. At least, if you were fast enough to use it before the sadness and regret showed; from Akane's expression, Hazō wasn't sure he had been.
XP AWARD: 1
Bonus XP AWARD: 1 (brevity)
It is now about 11pm. In the morning you will send messages to the various clans that you want to have meetings with. They may or may not be available on zero notice.
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, June 26, 2019, at 12pm London time.
