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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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ProperAttorney said:
You have my vote if you include asking Asuma to investigate what happened to the Nagi seal. Having two examples of 3D sealing seems like it would help with the theory behind it, not to mention that someone is likely independently going for this massive powerup.
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Too bad Hazou doesn't remember taking a visit to Shikamaru's Basement.
 
I've significantly updated my plan.

FaintlySorcerous said:
[X] Action Plan: Answering Asuma
Word count: <300
  • Can we articulate problems, ask for suggestions, then make requests?
    • Please deny requests which seem like power grabs - they're not coming from a place of subtle political manipulation or greed.
    • We only just realized our previous actions could have been interpreted as blackmail. We have massive blind spots.
  • The Great Seal.
    • HDK how 3D seals work, or what they're made of.
    • HDK much about the Great Seal, generally.
  • Suggestions:
    • Should we tell Orochimaru everything we know about 3D sealing? It'll markedly increase his personal power.
      • Tone: based on the Basement, Orochimaru unchecked rivals the be4uty.
    • More lore.
      • Missions for Leaf's Summoners to meet with storytellers/lorekeepers? They have long memories.
      • The Nagi seal - was it 3D?
      • Leaf archives and clan records may contain useful information. Could librarians search and relay their findings?
      • Information on the Sage, sealing (as in, locking away) entities, the Dragons, and sealing traditions unknown to us (carving?) could be crucial.
    • Any ideas for chakra-conductive stone? Describe it.
    • Other AMITY signatories might have useful information or expertise.
      • Tone: AMITY is geopolitics and that's way out of our lane.
  • HDK how to kill the remaining Dragons.
    • Again, lore.
    • We need to maximize firepower.
  • Suggestions:
    • Same lore requests.
    • Could Ruri be taught EM?
      • Can we attribute EM to Kumokogo/Enma?
    • AMITY Summoners - have you considered involving them?
    • Mareo could be an asset - can we concretely offer him Leaf citizenship? An ANBU escort to Leaf?
  • Other:
    • Why isn't anyone (other nations) else doing anything?
      • They've heard about it, surely.
    • Thank you for believing in us and mobilizing Leaf. We saw the Hat's impact on Jiraiya and know, in a very limited way, how much pressure you're under. We want to live up to the trust and patience you've extended us.
    • How can we help you help us?
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Does no one else think we should discuss the Rift/Naraka at all? I seem to be the only one whose mentioned it.

It's a Hail Mary, but we don't have to demand that Asuma provide Leaf aid to open the thing. He knows about it, he knows what we think about it and has his own opinions, and he knows that we've quietly continued to look into it.

Surely we could bring him up to speed on the situation, and ask what he thinks and whether it seems worth expending Leaf resources to pursue a Hail Mary? Especially considering Ami's firm belief that Akatsuki are investigating it; that alone is good enough reason to give it attention.

And anyway, we have to bring it to him before we eventually open the rift and mount a expedition inside. We have thoroughly learned that lesson. And this is hardly a powergrab; Leaf would benefit from a revived Jiraiya more than we would.
 
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Buggy said:
Does no one else think we should discuss the Rift/Naraka at all? I seem to be the only one whose mentioned it.

It's a Hail Mary, but we don't have to demand that Asuma provide Leaf aid to open the thing. He knows about it, he knows what we think about it and has his own opinions, and he knows that we've quietly continued to look into it.

Surely we could bring him up to speed on the situation, and ask what he thinks and whether it seems worth expending Leaf resources to pursue a Hail Mary? Especially considering Ami's firm belief that Akatsuki are investigating it; that alone is good enough reason to give it attention.

And anyway, we have to bring it to him before we eventually open the rift and mount a expedition inside. We have thoroughly learned that lesson. And this is hardly a powergrab; Leaf would benefit from a revived Jiraiya more than we would.
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We had a whole chapter talking to Ami and Kei about the Rift and what our best path forward looked like. I don't think bringing Asuma/Leaf in was our preferred method.
 
RandomOTP said:
Iirc, acronyms like "HDK" aren't allowed?
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As I understand it, there's no specific rules against acronyms or other wordplay except for the overall rule that the plan must be easily comprehensible to the QMs. Trying to cheat things with tons of jargon and stilted language (to avoid wasting extra words on grammar) is not allowed, but if it's an acronym they're already familiar with and makes sense to use there, I doubt they'd mind.
Buggy said:
Does no one else think we should discuss the Rift/Naraka at all? I seem to be the only one whose mentioned it.

It's a Hail Mary, but we don't have to demand that Asuma provide Leaf aid to open the thing. He knows about it, he knows what we think about it and has his own opinions, and he knows that we've quietly continued to look into it.

Surely we could bring him up to speed on the situation, and ask what he thinks and whether it seems worth expending Leaf resources to pursue a Hail Mary? Especially considering Ami's firm belief that Akatsuki are investigating it; that alone is good enough reason to give it attention.

And anyway, we have to bring it to him before we eventually open the rift and mount a expedition inside. We have thoroughly learned that lesson. And this is hardly a powergrab; Leaf would benefit from a revived Jiraiya more than we would.
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I'm against telling Asuma about the Rift for the same reasons I'm against using EM Nuke without a cover-up story: it does us little good to end one apocalypse by starting a new one.

Granted, Asuma getting control of the Rift isn't an apocalypse per se, but in our analysis with Ami and Kei it really looks like things will go badly for the world unless we get things right there.

Asuma would never willingly cede executive control of the Rift once he knew about it. He would see the immense, incredible value for Leaf it represents and monopolize it, no two ways about it. We can't even say that Asuma's use of it will be close enough to our use of it, because our plans for it involving resurrecting Pein and using his life-debt to take over the world. Treason of the highest order, essentially, and it would place Leaf de facto under the heel of Akatsuki in a way that Asuma would hate with all his might, no matter how good of a world we create.

Moreover, Asuma can't really do much to help us. He can't help us invent the seals needed to open it, so that timeframe is unchanged, and once the rift is open all ninja who go in will be reduced to civilian status: an ANBU squad at our beck and call is only marginally more useful than bringing a few Genin along. Whether he'd be able to actually speed up the resurrection timeframe at all is an open question, let alone whether he'd be able to speed it up enough to matter for Dragonwar purposes.

(Come to think of it, would they even be able to help even if we rezzed them? It's not like having a bunch of Essies hanging around Konoha helps the Crusade fight off in the Seventh Path, after all. Jiraiya used to be the Toad Summoner but now that's Noburi's gig and it's entirely plausible that Jiraiya's just locked out of the system now that someone else's taken it up.)

All-in-all it seems like a ton of cost for minimal gain. Giving the Rift to Asuma doesn't just deny us our own strategy for it, but according to Kei and Ami leaving Asuma or Akatsuki in control could spell disaster for the EN. If it guaranteed us a full Hokage lineup at the Crusade, maybe it'd be worth it, but as it stands I see almost zero expected gain and cataclysmic expected damage.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
I'm against telling Asuma about the Rift for the same reasons I'm against using EM Nuke without a cover-up story: it does us little good to end one apocalypse by starting a new one.

Granted, Asuma getting control of the Rift isn't an apocalypse per se, but in our analysis with Ami and Kei it really looks like things will go badly for the world unless we get things right there.

Asuma would never willingly cede executive control of the Rift once he knew about it. He would see the immense, incredible value for Leaf it represents and monopolize it, no two ways about it. We can't even say that Asuma's use of it will be close enough to our use of it, because our plans for it involving resurrecting Pein and using his life-debt to take over the world. Treason of the highest order, essentially, and it would place Leaf de facto under the heel of Akatsuki in a way that Asuma would hate with all his might, no matter how good of a world we create.

Moreover, Asuma can't really do much to help us. He can't help us invent the seals needed to open it, so that timeframe is unchanged, and once the rift is open all ninja who go in will be reduced to civilian status: an ANBU squad at our beck and call is only marginally more useful than bringing a few Genin along. Whether he'd be able to actually speed up the resurrection timeframe at all is an open question, let alone whether he'd be able to speed it up enough to matter for Dragonwar purposes.

(Come to think of it, would they even be able to help even if we rezzed them? It's not like having a bunch of Essies hanging around Konoha helps the Crusade fight off in the Seventh Path, after all. Jiraiya used to be the Toad Summoner but now that's Noburi's gig and it's entirely plausible that Jiraiya's just locked out of the system now that someone else's taken it up.)

All-in-all it seems like a ton of cost for minimal gain. Giving the Rift to Asuma doesn't just deny us our own strategy for it, but according to Kei and Ami leaving Asuma or Akatsuki in control could spell disaster for the EN. If it guaranteed us a full Hokage lineup at the Crusade, maybe it'd be worth it, but as it stands I see almost zero expected gain and cataclysmic expected damage.
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Maybe i'm misremembering that chapter, but my understanding was that we'd pursue the rift with some measure of Leaf support, and rescuing Pain would be a last minute Treason that we'd pursue after we stepped through the portal.

What's the plan otherwise? That we're going to mount a series of expeditions into a dangerous land, from a rift that's several days travel away, with resources we might have to source from Leaf? And Asuma doesn't notice his golden goose suddenly taking a week's vacation in the general direction of what said goose believes is a portal to the afterlife? A portal he commissioned a mission to not that long ago? Not to mention all the scrutiny we're no doubt under because of EM nuke; even if Asuma didn't know about the rift, he might be worried we suddenly went missing to nuke someone.

I don't see how this plan is feasible in secret; ninja abilities might be irrelevant in the rift, but we'll still want a expert onsite to open the rift. Hazo or Kagome has to go personally.

(Even if we just decide to close and recreate the rift, we would likely have to open it first for research purposes, so we face many of the same issues)
 
Buggy said:
Maybe i'm misremembering that chapter, but my understanding was that we'd pursue the rift with some measure of Leaf support, and rescuing Pain would be a last minute Treason that we'd pursue after we stepped through the portal.

What's the plan otherwise? That we're going to mount a series of expeditions into a dangerous land, from a rift that's several days travel away, with resources we might have to source from Leaf? And Asuma doesn't notice his golden goose suddenly taking a week's vacation in the general direction of what said goose believes is a portal to the afterlife? A portal he commissioned a mission to not that long ago? Not to mention all the scrutiny we're no doubt under because of EM nuke; even if Asuma didn't know about the rift, he might be worried we suddenly went missing to nuke someone.

I don't see how this plan is feasible in secret; ninja abilities might be irrelevant in the rift, but we'll still want a expert onsite to open the rift. Hazo or Kagome has to go personally.

(Even if we just decide to close and recreate the rift, we would likely have to open it first for research purposes, so we face many of the same issues)
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The way it read to me is that we'd do our best to keep Asuma at arms length so he doesn't realize the true magnitude of what's about to happen. He heard the report, but as with the Dragons at first he only has Hazou's word that it's actually factually the afterlife (and he doesn't know about the seance we did to get concrete intel on Jiraiya's situation). I recall Mari saying at one point that she could pull off a maneuver where we claim ownership of 'the land on the other side of the rift' and state that we intend to get value out of it somehow, all without disclosing what we've actually discovered there.

So while it's not possible to keep completely secret, there's solid hope to keep executive control over the Rift for long enough to rez Pein and/or Jiraiya. We will have to make a series of expeditions into a dangerous land, but we'll be able to aim for Pein from the very beginning.

At least, that's the impression I have.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
The way it read to me is that we'd do our best to keep Asuma at arms length so he doesn't realize the true magnitude of what's about to happen. He heard the report, but as with the Dragons at first he only has Hazou's word that it's actually factually the afterlife (and he doesn't know about the seance we did to get concrete intel on Jiraiya's situation). I recall Mari saying at one point that she could pull off a maneuver where we claim ownership of 'the land on the other side of the rift' and state that we intend to get value out of it somehow, all without disclosing what we've actually discovered there.

So while it's not possible to keep completely secret, there's solid hope to keep executive control over the Rift for long enough to rez Pein and/or Jiraiya. We will have to make a series of expeditions into a dangerous land, but we'll be able to aim for Pein from the very beginning.

At least, that's the impression I have.
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The problem I see with this is, by this point, Asuma knows we're regularly involved with world-changing inventions/out-of-context-problems, and then make poor and/or Treasonous decisions with them.

Skywalkers, EM Nuke, Dragons. Asuma has definitely caught on to the trend. So what happens when we start being all coy and using legal loopholes about anything even vaguely related to the alleged portal to the afterlife that we have personally told him about? He's going to put two and two together, and realize that not only have we got something big but we're keeping it from him, and then he'll dig out the details and we're going to be sent on a solo expedition into Naraka the painful way.

Maybe we could manage this back when it was just Skywalkers. But at this point, Post-EM Nuke, Post-Dragons, there's no way. And Amy doesn't know about EM Nuke and I can't remember if she knows about Dragons or not, so it's entirely possible that she hasn't realized just how much scrutiny Hazo is going to be under for the indefinite future.
 
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I think we're also ignoring the fact that Ami has her own motivations here. She doesn't want Asuma to have the power over the portals because he'd be boring with it.

But he's also not stupid, and able to recognize the same things as Ami, for why we don't just use it to bring back all of Leaf's heroes immediately.
 
[X] Interlude: Yuno's New Genin Team
[X] Continue Previous Plan
[X] Action Plan: Answering Asuma

Sir Stompy said:
[X] Action Plan: The Means to Preserve the World
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This plan seems almost like the opposite of what we should be doing. Pure power grabbing with little in the way of concrete Dragon related stuff.
  • The previous 4th Hokage lootbox is literally the example he gave us for where we used the crisis for personal empowerment and then didn't share our findings.
  • Using the Hokage to pressure our girlfriend to give us secrets without even asking her for them first feels really shitty. Especially in a world where secrets is one of the major rights that the nobility has.
  • Why ask for a Summoning Scroll for Akane before putting in said work?
  • The Mareo part seems fine on the surface, but if the Dragons are so dangerous as to make Asuma put all cards on the table, wouldn't the logical response be killing the old man anyway and making it look like an accident? If we include this line then we should make a good argument as to why that would be counterproductive. Something along the line that the Bear Boss won't ever trust Leaf that way.
  • I like asking for chakra metal and chakra golems, but the scarcity seems to make it a difficult resource to train up 3D sealing blindly from zero. Especially given its immense value and Asuma's ability to train any of his heirs in using it in combat. We can still ask though, I guess.
  • Asking for secret lore that the Tower or the Sarutobi might have access to is great, but Do. Not. Share. Nara/Mori secrets of existential proportion with the Hokage. That's up to Shikamaru to do. They have kept it secret for centuries for a reason. We can ask Shikamaru directly whether there is any reason at all for us to need to know right now and he can then phrase answers to contain minimal information not related to Dragons.
Your plan also includes nothing whatsoever about seeking cooperators at AMITY.

Kylinger said:
- And finally an oath. Protections for clan secrets anybody shares for the purpose of fighting the dragons, bound by honor among allies and the Hokages wrath for oathbreakers. Those who we believe when they swear said oath should be outfitted with every clan secret the Goketsu have that could possibly be useful, short FOOM and things that are not our secrets to propogate (e.g. pangolin jutsu.)
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I like most of what you suggest and I even like this in principle. Only issue I see is Hazou picking and choosing who he "believes" when they take the solemn oath. Anyone we explicitly don't share with anyway would be someone whose honor we kick with our feet and then take a huge dump on, before putting a "I am a worthless dunce" hat on the resulting pile of shit.
Inferno Vulpix said:
We will have to make a series of expeditions into a dangerous land, but we'll be able to aim for Pein from the very beginning.
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I mean Clan Goketsu is rich enough to post up A-Rank missions, no?
 
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Adhoc vote count started by Paperclipped on Apr 12, 2023 at 9:41 AM, finished with 237 posts and 21 votes.
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Voting is closed.


Edit: Voting meddled with to use the correct start time.
 
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Hmm... a thought occurs to me too late to matter. Doesn't Leaf have the best propagandists in the world? Tap some of them for this. We are literally fighting to stop the end of the world. It should be easy, and it should be effective.
 
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