Okay, so we have a little over a month to get to the Conclave. I think we should have Noburi send his envoy to Dog now, so that Hazou, Kei, and Noburi can arrive to the Conclave as a trio.
- Enma suggested leaning heavily on Jiraiya's reputation, and as his three heirs traveling as a trio of Summoners, this helps more than Hazou arriving as an individual.
- Invokes the Sannin mythos and evokes imagery of Hazou's group being potential Sannin (literally 'Three Ninja') of their own someday
- Helps prevent any of them as individuals getting their teeth kicked in by apparently hostile summons
- Is just a badass way to get the original gang together for a while
I have an additional sugggestion, one that definitely should be run by Cannai first and after getting some more lore about the process. We can bring a
gthsss Archaeopteryx to the Conclave. We know that only the smallest Archaeopteryx remain:
If we find one small enough (like, Panda-sized) then I think we could cage it and transport it to the Conclave for dramatic effect. This
will be a pain, but I think pretty much any buff we can grant to Hazou's socials is worth the investment since he won't be cutting it in raw numbers when it comes to speechifying. Unveiling the fate that awaits the clans if they don't act is a serious wake-up call for anyone sitting around and twiddling their thumbs still, and Enma seemed to want Hazou to light a fire under their asses. I think this is a pretty good option for doing so (again, if Cannai thinks it would be effective.)
With Noburi, transporting a
gthsss may be trivial, if Ma and Pa think he can safely drain it. However, I don't think there's time for Noburi to come all the way to Arachnid and meet up with us, so at minimum Hazou will need to transport it to Dog to meet up with Noburi. Some suggestions:
- Ask Kei/Panda to help test. Can Panda break out of a steel cage? If necessary, purchase a cage from the Inuzuka designed to hold chakra beasts/ask them for tips on transporting them.
- Goo bomb, then nonlethally Taijutsu attack the Archaeopteryx to knock it out and place it in the cage. From there, Hazou can use Noburi-provided drugs to sedate it. Alternatively,
@RandomOTP pointed out that hawks and some other avians will cease all resistance when blindfolded, so we can try that too. If it's primarily driven by hunger, simply feeding it may be sufficient to keep it docile.
- From there, we can take the route back to Dog that Hazou took to Arachnid, and bring any interested Arachnids/Enma, who will be arriving in Arachnid soon. Traveling through Cat again isn't ideal if we're going to have to fight any hunters again, so we may want to arrange some tributes/fuckoff warnings in advance. Alternatively, we can travel the coast by boat, as the Arachnids did when they first washed up on the shores of Dog.
- After meeting up with Kei and Noburi in Dog, we can travel to Pangolin and speak at the Conclave, with our
gthsss in tow and do our thing.
The primary issue with this approach is that that travel time makes it tougher to complete any last-minute Sealing projects to buff up Hazou. Chakrascope is likely doable, Goo Bombs plausibly, Chakdar 2.0 I'm not sure...
