Chapter 484: The Power of Teamwork
Alright. Let's see how this goes.
Immediately after Chapter 482, and not long before Chapter 483…
Yeah, I'm so confused about the current timeline of the last few chapters. I'm just not going to worry about it.
Kei might be objective in her narration, but given her track record of violent emotional reactions when hurt, it seemed like a bad idea to gamble Mari's safety on it.
"Keiko," Hazō began, "I can explain everything."
"You will," Keiko said. "Summoning Technique: Pankurashun."
Should he start running now? No, that would just provoke her. Them.
Hazō hadn't done anything wrong. Keiko would see that if he could only find the right way to explain. She'd never said he wasn't allowed to meet her sister, and the marriage proposal… well, Keiko couldn't seriously believe that hogwash, could she?
"Summoner," Pankurashun rumbled. "You wish me to assist in training?"
"No, an interrogation. Inform me if you perceive Hazō to be attempting deception. Inflict pain on him if he attempts to flee. Otherwise follow my lead."
Pankurashun's body language shifted from one unreadable alien species stance into a different unreadable alien species stance.
"Understood. Has setting him on fire changed your relationship that drastically?"
"No, that was as it should be. This concerns betrayal."
"Keiko, we don't have time for this!" Hazō exclaimed. "If you just come back to the inn, I can explain everything to you and Noburi at the same time!"
"Collateral damage, Hazō," Keiko said in a voice that contained no hint of humour. "Now, did you organise and attend the date with Ami on Jiraiya's orders?"
"It wasn't a date! And no," he admitted sheepishly, "it was my idea. He just gave it the go-ahead."
"Is that so."
The aura intensified. He shivered.
Keiko's voice did not change at all, which was more terrifying than if she'd shouted.
"Did you propose marriage to my sister, or imply that you desired it, or attempt to seduce her for any reason?"
"Seduce her?" Hazō repeated incredulously. "Keiko, are serious?"
Now he just had to pray that she didn't ask the question in reverse.
"Did you attend the meeting with the intent of performing any of the actions listed?" she asked, ignoring him.
"Of course not! I just wanted to feel her out"—Keiko's eyes narrowed dangerously—"I mean to get a sense of what she was like as a person, and whether we could cooperate in the future! It was completely innocent!"
Despite his innocuous answers, Keiko was exuding more and more of a sense of danger. She wasn't the scary Ami, for which Hazō was immensely grateful, but the look in her eyes and the biting cold brought back memories he'd been trying to suppress. He was reminded that, while his stepsister had many admirable qualities, stability was not one of them. He probably wasn't in actual physical danger, but it was only a probably.
That's putting it mildly.....It really doesn't take much for Kei to become both unstable and extremely dangerous (even to family members like Hazō). Let's just say that if she wasn't our sister, I would be doing my abosolute best to never let her learn about FOOM. Kei still needs to grow before I feel comfortable giving her S-Rank power. Well, she has less than two years. Let's hope she can do it.
"I think," Hazō said with perfect sincerity, "that you're far more dangerous than any loan shark I could find."
The glow faded a little further. Ami's lips stretched in what looked like an involuntary smile.
Are you sure about that?
"For someone whose cause of death will be saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time, Hazō, every now and again you do manage to roll a critical hit. Not that, on reflection, you have anything to fear from loan sharks—at least not while you have Haru."
"That's over," Hazō said definitively. "The Gōketsu do not harm civilians just because it's easy. Don't get the wrong idea, Ami—I hate that it happened, and if it ever happens again, then it'll because I failed to enforce clan values, and I will take proper responsibility."
"I know," Ami said. "Akane has so much faith in you it's frankly unhealthy, and you should be doing something about it before she ends up like Kei."
That's a good point, actually. We should talk about that later.
Also, I really want to emphasize that even Ami, with her Kei-sized blindspot when it comes to her sister, recognizes Kei's problem. (May be useful later this conversation).
"But forget people who accidentally let slip all sorts of interesting information about the Gōketsu because lying is counter to the very core of their identity. What's this favour you want from me?"
Akane has Deceit 8. We need to raise that as soon as she isn't at risk of being frontlined during war. It's the only way to prevent Ami from learning about our biggest secrets, if she hasn't already.
Either way, if Ami can exploit this, other people can too.
"I'd like you to help me optimise a sensitive conversation which could have some very bad outcomes unless it's handled just right."
"Ooh." Ami grinned. "A challenge. The Frozen Skein sucks at optimising social, so this is going to come down to me and my personal awesomeness. Which, of course, will be reflected in the cost. Who's the lucky target?"
Hazō breathed in slowly, then out again. This was the first of the pivoting points that might decide Mari's fate.
"One Mori Ami," he said as casually as he could without giving away the fact that he wasn't feeling casual at all. "I need a means of persuasion so good that it will work on her even though she was the one to help optimise it. Do you think you can handle it?"
Ami's grin stretched to extraordinary proportions. "I knew there was a reason why I didn't warp your cognition and leave you a hollow puppet subordinate to my will the first time we met. What's the lucky topic?"
Ok, all good so far.
"The first approach I'd like you to consider," he said, "is the raw emotional approach. First, we explain the emotional truth of the situation to Ami. Specifically, we tell her that Kei feels Mari sacrificed her for my sake, and that this was a betrayal beyond what she could endure."
The grin evaporated, leaving a chill mist that blurred Ami's feelings into unreadability.
YOU WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO LEAD WITH THAT. DON'T TALK ABOUT SPECIFICS UNTIL YOU KNOW WHICH APPROACH IS BEST. OTHERWISE THERE WOULD BE NO POINT, AS YOU'VE ALREADY LOST THE OPPURTUNITY TO BREAK IT TO HER IN THE OPTIMAL WAY.
Also, this was a
terrible way to break this to her.
"Kei cut ties with her completely." It was still hard to believe even as Hazō said it. Irrationally, he himself felt a little betrayed, not by either of the two, but by a universe that had refused to give them the chance to heal and rebuild that they both deserved. With all the suffering already present in the world, with all the horror of an interested Orochimaru, was it really necessary to add more drama still?
Yeah but Snowflake didn't make up her mind about that yet.
"I'm hoping that this approach will persuade Ami that, even though Kei was hurt, the incident is concluded, so there's no need for her to involve herself in a destructive fashion."
You're an idiot.
Ami gave a thoughtful nod. "Yeah, that's a nice stab at how things might go wrong—if you're an optimist who makes Akane look like Kei. You're drawing Ami's attention to Kei being hurt and Mari getting proper consequences. Obviously, Ami's going to ask if the consequences did the job. Is Kei actually protected? Is Mari actually punished enough? You're gambling that she'll reach the same conclusions as you, yet your analysis is too shallow to serve as a secure foundation."
Oh look, this exactly what happened. Instead of having one approach that was specifically tailored to Ami and had deep, compelling analysis to back it up we are instead getting this, where we are just randomly choosing what is fairly obvious to be a bad approach as our first impression. We're just throwing out a few shallow arguments and then moving on to the next one.
"On the whole, this approach is very unreliable for the purpose of achieving your goal, which I presume is to protect Mari from excruciating destruction at Ami's hands."
Yeah, I could have told you that.
"So what are the events chronologically?" Ami asked. "I can hardly model without."
See?
Hazō gulped. This was the point where, if Ami snapped out of helpful mode, it was over.
Which was one of the reasons I objected to this strategy, even if it had been executed in a way that left out all specifics and let Hazō take the "optimal" apporach when he broke the actual news to her.
"Why did the Hokage not deal with Orochimaru personally?" Ami interrupted.
If I were you, Hazō, I would purposely blank my face. She'll know what it means.
both Kei and Snowflake completely rejected her.
Snowflake did NOT completely reject Mari.
"I believe you have missed an essential point," she said. "You have described circumstances under which Mari actively threatened Kei's life, and acted according to a rationale which is unaltered by her loss of connection to Kei. If anything, if Mari accepts Kei's decision, she is more likely to sacrifice her in the future, since her value to Mari will have decreased while yours and that of others will not.
Hence why my "factual" approach was all about establishing Orochimaru as a nightmare scenario that is not indicative of future odds. Real shame I ran out of spoons before I could properly finish it, but that's finals for you.
"Alternatively, Mari must be eliminated, or disabled in a way that would prevent her from exercising her agency against Kei—in other words, made physically incapable of violence or communication in a way beyond Tsunade's ability to restore.
"Of these options, eliminating Mari is easiest, most reliable, and least problematic for Ami's future plans, although the torture element of incapacitation holds emotional appeal.
......
"Wow," Ami said. "That sure would be a great way to shut down dialogue fast. Hazō, I don't think you get what the Final Gift Programme is. When Ami created it, in what she considers a burst of genius to be proud of given the extreme constraints she was under—she created a single solution to a whole bunch of problems. Ami survives, starving families get saved, Orochimaru stops kidnapping innocents, and the Hokage stops losing face and having his authority undermined because he can't stop Orochimaru kidnapping innocents. For every ninja enjoying Orochimaru's hospitality right now, there's a family that's not going to starve or do any of the vile things that poor people are forced to do in order not to starve."
Don't compare the program itself; compare Mari's position to Ami's position. That's the far more effective approach.
Also, "Orochimaru stops kidnapping innocents" doesn't appear to be working.
First, it's a moot point because if she hadn't offered Orochimaru something really good, she wouldn't have made it out of the compound alive, and nobody would've got anything. Failing to follow through once she was out? Probably even worse.
This! This is what should be emphasized. Mari was in the exact same place except
she deliberately did not follow through so that Kei could escape, at great risk to her own safety.
Ami's model of you says that her actions as you've presented them—causing the torturous deaths of dozens of innocents for her personal benefit—should be monstrous and unacceptable in your eyes. However, the model also says that you would intervene if you saw someone you care about performing monstrous acts. Yet you have never attempted to persuade her to stop, or to seek more moral alternatives. To Ami, who is constantly looking for additional data points with which to navigate the ambiguity of your relationship, that you should not confront her until you need a tool to use in an argument tilts that ambiguity heavily away from 'family' and towards 'outsider'. It is best not to dwell on the emotional implications at this time, except to advise you not to follow up such an argument with any appeal to the relationship between Ami and the Gōketsu."
HAZŌ: Ami should revise her model of Hazō if Ami believes that Hazō would be able to either come up with a better solution than Ami or would be willing to go against Ami's agency, which is what Hazō would be forced to do if he wanted to undo her work personally instead of convincing her to take a different, presumably better, solution.
@Velorien, I'm really curious how Ami would respond to such a line. Any hints?
Also, Ami actually felt the hypocracy argument. Makes me think it would be worth pursuing if it was presented better and focused on the right things.
Ami considered. "Better. I'm sorry to say that your emotional appeals don't show a very good model of Ami's personality—which isn't a big deal, since there's only one person in the world with a good model of Ami's personality—but pragmatism is equally effective coming from anyone.
Let's put a pin in that one.
"Your problem is the aforementioned threat to Kei's life. For as long as inflicting harm on Mari is necessary to protect Kei, the consequences don't matter. Ami will sacrifice anything and everything, including herself, for that purpose.
Hence why I wanted to argue that it is
not nessesary since this was a compete nightmare scenario, as Ami well knows, that forced Mari into a position where putting Kei in danger was even an option. Since Mari then went on to put herself at substantial unnessesary risk to protect Kei, it's very clear that Mari values Kei deeply, perhaps even more than she does herself, and would never have done this had this not been a complete nightmare scenario.
[insert Ami's quotes about how Orochimaru blindsides everyone, her incuded, and about how Orochimaru is something that cannot be fought or run from]
Given that, it would be far more productive to help Hazō come up with anti-Orochimaru contingency plans than it would to neutralize Mari, seeing as Mari will act as a steward protector of Kei in
all circumstances and is only a danger when nightmares like Orochimaru show up.
More broadly, Ami doesn't think in terms of insuperable barriers. If it's necessary to eliminate Mari without angering the Hokage, she will find a way to eliminate Mari without angering the Hokage. If eliminating Mari would hurt Kei, she would find a way to minimise that hurt, though I would say that Ami is unlikely to consider that a major issue when Kei's life is at stake. If it's necessary to eliminate Mari without undermining the Leaf-Mist alliance, then she would have to make sure the alliance was sufficiently solid, or that Mari's death would not have a strong impact on it, or she could simply wait until the war was over, though this is undesirable because it could leave plenty of time for Mari to attempt to sacrifice Kei again.
Like I said, this (reffering to when we planned this) update was also the one where we learned that Ami ousted
the Mizukage from power.
"That actually fits my next suggested approach," Hazō said, "which is try to convince Ami to accept my best-light interpretation of the situation. Mari objectively did her best to save everyone, which is to say that she not only chose the highest-probability gamble, but she also put her life on the line by lying to Orochimaru—and he did hurt her as a result—and she was right in thinking that, thanks to both of us getting out of the building and then getting help from Kei's allies, we'd be able to get through the situation without anyone being kidnapped by Orochimaru, now or in the future.
Much better! This is very similar to the approach I wrote, except that (by nature of this game of hypotheticals), it doesn't have any analysis to back it up and it is seperated from comparisons to Ami's own visit from Orochimaru.
"Besides, it averted the worst-case scenario where Orochimaru found out about Snowflake at some random later date, and kidnapped Kei at a time when we weren't ready to marshal all our resources to save her.
"In other words, everyone did their best and everything worked out for the best. Following that up by hurting Mari would only ruin the success."
"The Snowflake point is an interesting one," Ami said thoughtfully, "and might give Ami pause.
You didn't even mention that SNOWFLAKE WAS OPENLY ACTING AS A COGNITIVELY-INDEPENDENT ENTITY. This was one of your best arguments and you threw it away by having it be a hypothetical worse case scenario instead of an inevitability. Seriously, Orochimaru could
easily have learned about this at any time, especially now that he's not permanently in his lab due to his deployment.
"I'm running low on ideas here," Hazō admitted. "There's still the adversarial approach, which I really don't want to turn to, but needs listing because right now I'll take anything. Suppose we bribed or threatened Ami?"
Ami gave him an incredulous look. "What with?"
.......
Called it.
Not only is this ineffective, it's downright insulting to Ami and implies that she'd give up on protecting Kei for petty trinkets.
"The Gōketsu are a powerful clan," Hazō said. "We have options. We could refuse to cooperate with Ami on future projects. We could actively obstruct her or even damage her general position in Leaf. In an adversarial scenario, Mari would have no reason not to go all out, and we'd have no reason not to go all out to protect her. There's also that one thing she's hoping for from us which we could withhold if we had to."
Ami chuckled. "Hazō, Ami is fresh from having brought down a Kage. She is in no mental state to submit to intimidation, and she certainly considers her position in Leaf to be stronger than the Gōketsu's, insofar as both have made disproportionate contributions to Leaf and both hold the promise of many more, but only one has a track record of risking the village's very survival. Moving the conflict from an Ami versus Mari to an Ami versus Gōketsu footing would not improve your situation. As for the other thing, you are not the only one in Leaf with the capability. Ami has plenty of contacts who would happily help her to fill in the blanks if you refused to share.
That's what I keep saying!
Unfortunately, there is information known to Ami but not to you which predisposes Ami to be sceptical of Mari's capacity for consistency.
Plurality. Maybe we can ask Mari what Ami meant by this later.
"The bad kind of incident," Hazō said.
I would have said "The Orochimaru kind of incident," since Ami has said herself how far beyond-nightmare that is in her eyes.
"Ami," Hazō said, remembering his briefing, "please remember that, whatever choices were made, everything ended well. I'm safe. Kei's safe, and now she doesn't have to worry about Orochimaru randomly finding out about Snowflake and kidnapping her without us knowing." What had she said? Kei's feelings? "Kei drew a line herself. She did probably the worst thing she could do to Mari."
"All that tells me," Ami said, "is that Kei lacked options. Mari used her as a tool knowing she could die. Never wanting to see her again is a given; it's not punishment. Nor is it prevention of further crimes."
"Kei chose her own way to deal with the situation." Hazō had a sense that he needed to tread lightly. If he got too confrontational, Ami might argue with him, or she might just lose interest and leave to do whatever terrible things she intended to do. "I don't know if she could have hurt Mari worse, but she didn't try. She decided this was what was best. If you ruin that for her, if you decide to take revenge for her when she didn't take revenge for herself, will that be the right thing to do?"
C'mon, lean more into the agency argument. Ami hold personal agency
very highly and your best arugument at this point is to frame taking revenge on Mari as depriving Kei of her own agency.
"This is the ending Kei wanted," Hazō reiterated. "Don't you think you'll hurt her worse if you change it without her consent, and violate her agency, and then she's stuck living with the consequences?"
Yes!
"And what about me?!" Ami demanded. "Should I stand by for the rest of my life, watching her get hurt, watching her suffer, and pretending it's OK because she still hasn't learned to fight back? You give big speeches about how the Gōketsu protect their own, but you want me to do nothing while the Heartbreaker does what she does best to my only sister? You nearly ended a clan for being rude to her, but I'm supposed to brush off Mari abusing and destroying her trust?"
HAZŌ: You once told me that control, agency over your own life, is the most important thing in the world. You said you were willing to let nothing, not even your own feelings, take away your control. So, why are you willing to deprive Kei of her own agency to alleviate the discomfort it causes you? Do you consider it to be a worthwile trade or do you lack the self-control to follow through with what you know is right?
@Velorien, once again. I'm really curious (though I don't think it's necessarily smart to take such an enraging stance) and would love a hint. Wouldn't the Ami's follow up line be very fun to write?
Maybe the stress and the accumulated tiredness of the day had left Hazō's brain in a slightly stranger place than its normal strangeness, maybe his mind just happened to be in the right shape at the right time, but something enormous went click in his head at her words, just like that.
"Ami," he asked, "why didn't you do anything about the kids bullying Kei?"
Ami froze. Completely. Perfectly. Silently.
Hazō waited.
"Because she asked me not to," Ami said quietly.
Yay! Hazōpilot to the rescue. He know Kei and Ami better than most players, so when the plan ran out and he scrambled to thing he was able to pull the best approach out of nowhere.
"But the meta's over now," she added. "So are… other things. Go home, Hazō."
Ominous
