Hazō Danger IntoTheUnknown studied the granite box before him. It might hold the apocalypse. It might hold a minor curiosity. It might even hold nothing, although that seemed unlikely.
"You know, if I was a Naruto clone," he mused aloud, "I would probably say something like 'hey, Boss, you know this completely sucks, right?'"
"Good thing you're not," Hazō Prime responded with a smile. "You understand that I'm not making you do this, right? I know you're compelled to follow orders, but I'm not ordering you. If you think it's a bad idea, don't do it."
"Nah. We thought it was a good idea when we made me and I haven't changed our mind just because we made me and not you. Also, we need better pronouns." He tossed one hand in an amused 'what can you do' gesture.
Prime held out one fist and knocked knuckles with his duplicate. "Good luck. Thanks for this."
"Heyyyyy," IntoTheUnkown gave him a cheesy grin and two thumbs up. "If it was easy then they wouldn't need us, right? Besides, 'IntoTheUnknown' is literally my last name."
"And 'Danger' is your middle name, I know," Prime said with a grin. "I was there when you chose it, remember? Also, your family name is still Gōketsu, so 'IntoTheUnknown' is your second middle name." He shook his head. "Honestly, you're such a ham."
IntoTheUnknown laughed. "Just because
you're always aware of the social consequences of being a goof and therefore do not allow yourself to indulge, that doesn't mean
I can't. Advantages of a doomed existence with the fragility of a soap bubble: whatever goes wrong ain't my problem so I can relax and have fun."
"Right." Prime shook his head in amusement. "Good luck."
"Thanks, bro. Keep the family safe, eh? Uplift forever." He extended his fist once more, and once more Hazō Prime bumped it. "Okay, wall it up."
Prime stepped back, cut four quick handseals, and raised his arms. Granite shot forth from the ground at an angle, merging together at the top to enclose Gōketsu Hazō Danger IntoTheUnknown, his tools, and the granite box that surrounded the maybe-apocalypse.
Locked away from the outside world, IntoTheUnknown took a moment to check around and make sure that there was no light coming into the box through any tiny chinks or cracks. Nope; Prime had done his job properly. Likewise, there was a nice thick layer of granite below him, so whatever came out of the box couldn't simply slip into the dirt.
Good.
He took a Jiraiya's Awesome Daybright Lantern seal out of one pouch, suppressed the resulting twinge of loss, lit the seal up, and affixed it to the north wall with a dab of pitch. Three more went on the other walls so as to make the light as even as possible and the shadows as few. A trio of Tunneler's Friend seals took care of making sure he wouldn't suffocate. (The Hazōllective wasn't sure if it was
possible for a Shadow Clone to suffocate and none of them were anxious to do the experiment.)
By the time he was done with that there came a faint
tunk, tunk on the wall, signifying that Prime had finished setting up the Five Seal Barrier on the outer walls. Whatever happened in here should be contained. He tapped back to let Prime know that the message was received, then picked up his sledgehammer with a sigh.
Sadly, the universe had finally proven Kagome-sensei wrong about something: explosives could not in fact solve all problems. It would have been nice to simply blast the inner box open, but a regular explosive in this enclosed space would kill the user. Kagome-sensei's directional explosives were also out, since they might cause spalling and lethal ricochets or damage the contents of the box. That was most definitely to be avoided; this situation was already uncertain enough. Instead, he took the seals off the inner box and smashed it with the sledgehammer.
It felt good to swing the hammer. Granted, Hazō Danger IntoTheUnknown wasn't the Hazō who had been spending all his time on frustrating paperwork, and frustrating summoning teaching, and worrying about the war effort, and and and..., but he remembered being the one doing all those things. Having a nice, simple problem that could be solved by smashing it with a big hammer like a caveman? Oorah.
Granted, it was going to take a lot of cavemanning (was that a word? whatever, it was now) to get into this box. When the HOWS seal had started failing, Hazō Prime had MEWed it up in a foot-thick layer of granite, slapped a Five Seal Barrier on it, and left it well enough alone. The box had been sitting here three days and nothing had gone wrong yet; Kagome-sensei, Hazō Prime, and Hazō ThirdOpinionAndTiedVoteBreaker had decided (surprisingly, unanimously) that at this point it made more sense to inspect the contents of the box and see what needed to be done, if anything.
IntoTheUnknown had only a sliver of chakra, as Noburi had drained him nearly dry before they started. The Hazōllective had decided that it would be better for him not to have too much, as it was wildly unlikely that it would let him do anything useful and being almost out would prevent any unlikely scenarios such as the failure taking over his barely-corporeal body and using his skills to escape containment. As a result of this lack, IntoTheUnknown could not chakra boost and was forced to smash through the foot-thick granite with nothing but raw muscle power. Honestly, it felt better to do it this way, and he found himself grateful that it was necessary. He undoubtedly would have boosted if he could have, simply through force of habit, and in the process he would have robbed himself of the pleasing experience of doing a job using muscles that he had earned through years of training as opposed to simply magic that he happened to have as a fortunate stroke of his birth.
He smiled to himself, knowing that Prime would remember that thought when they reunited. Perhaps he would take time out in the future to do a job the hard way simply to feel what it was like.
It took a few swings of the hammer to break a big enough crack in the granite box that surrounded the maybe-failing, maybe-failed, maybe-perfectly-safe-but-how-likely-is-that seal. Once he had that, IntoTheUnknown wedged a spike into the gap and slammed it in until it broke through. Fifteen more minutes of work and he had a large enough hole that he could point an Usamatsu's Glorious Life-Saving Purifier in to suck up any poison gases that might be emerging. He gave that a minute or so, then used a Jiraiya's Awesome Daybright Lantern seal, a mirror, and a lot of careful fumbling to look inside. After all, no reason to stick your face where a horrific Out-escapee could leap out and grab you.
Inside the box was nothing surprising. The non-glowing HOWS seal and a bunch of empty space.
Hazō Danger IntoTheUnknown frowned at that. He set his tools aside, left the Purifier pointed into the hole just in case, and sat down to think and drink some hot chocolate. (Sure, he had memories of drinking hot chocolate from back when he was Hazō Prime, but that didn't mean he couldn't experience it directly.)
After a few minutes of fruitlessly spinning his mental wheels he stood up and very carefully extended his pinky into the box. When it failed to melt, explode, or get infested with invisible monsters, he cautiously stuck his hand in. When that too failed to liquify, attract the attention of Outer monstrosities and/or Jashin, teleport him into a caldera, or cause one or more laws of physics to reverse themselves in painful fashion, he hesitantly touched the seal.
It was warm. Not hot, just warm. Comfortably so, in fact. It would have felt quite nice tucked into gloves or boots but it wasn't enough to be felt from more than a few inches away.
He couldn't stop himself from cringing at the unavoidable images of what might happen, but he forced himself to leave his hand in contact with the seal for a slow count of 100. Only then did he pull the seal out of its granite container, taking great pains not to fold it or scrape it against the edges of the hole. The seal continued being unthreateningly warm. It didn't get hotter, it didn't get colder, and it didn't try to eat his face or cuddle him. Just a nice, steady output of comfortable heat.
A chill rippled down his back. The seal had failed—obviously, since it was supposed to be emitting light and not heat—but it had failed in a useful way. That...was wild. Sure, there was no reason that seal failures
had to be harmful, but there were a lot more ways to be harmful than helpful. Apparently, Hazō had rolled triple sixes fifty times in succession without using the Iron Nerve. Between this and the results of his earlier importuning of Jashin...well, the existence of a sorta-beneficent deity was starting to look more plausible.
"If anyone relevant is listening, and you took any action to help with this, thank you very much," he whispered.
He thought for another minute, trying to see what value he could still extract from this situation. Nothing came to mind, except perhaps for the obvious inspiration: Intentionally reproducing a seal failure was (as per Kagome-sensei) "set-your-face-on-fire stupid", but intentionally
researching a seal that produced heat...well, that was a different story. Forget putting it in your gloves and boots during the winter, what if the citizens of Leaf could use it to heat their houses? Or Leaf ninja could use it as a campfire in the woods so that they didn't have to risk a fire that could be seen by the enemy?
Well, actually, heating Leaf's civilian houses with such a seal would put the firewood vendors out of business and bring the wrath of the Merchant Council down upon the Gōketsu. Also, there was probably some reason why using it in the field was a bad idea. He couldn't think of one but most off-the-cuff ideas turned out to have issues that needed fixing before deployment. Regardless, it would be useful once Kei had helped spot and resolve issues.
With a satisfied smile, he set the miraculously failed-safe seal on the granite floor and dispelled himself. Prime was going to be amazed.
Author's Notes: The plan for this update was predicated on being able to have multiple Shadow Clones each researching a separate project. Unfortunately, when I started writing this I noticed that the QMs had made a mistake in the Summoning Scroll Acolyte stunt. It provides an enormous boost in Hazō's ability to do sealing research, but at the expense of giving him a Mild mental Consequence that takes a couple days to heal. Unfortunately, when the QMs wrote the stunt we brainoed and wrote 'Physical' instead of 'Mental'. Shadow Clones pass mental but not physical Consequences back to their Prime, meaning that this correction puts the kibosh on being able to ignore the downside of SSA while multithreading your research. Because of the error we called a mulligan on the plan; the specified amount of time passed but the players are voting on what research, if any, they want to have happened during this period. Once they decide, we might simply announce the results of that research OOC or I might write another scene or two describing the outcome. We'll see.
Anyway, if you happened to click through the link in the title to see the plan and you're wondering why the update didn't address any of it, that's why.
This update covered 6 days. If research happened then that time represents 5 days for research prep, and 1 day for actually producing the seal aka making the research roll. If no research happened then this was simply a timeskip.
XP AWARD: 30
Brevity XP: 6
"GM had fun" XP: 10
It is now 9pm and the family is gathered for dinner.
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Saturday, February 26, 2022, at 12pm London time.
