Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

Orisha91 · May 6, 2024

I'd want Mari to check out the economic viability of the miasma caverns if she and the clan want to do something productive. There's a couple uses I had in mind for the place, especially now that Kei confirmed that the most significant threat down there was no larger than a chakra vole. I think some regular d-ranks or till-n-fills would be prudent for the foreseeable future in order to figure out how to use the place. Some of my thoughts are:

Transportation tunnel to and back from Leaf. Perhaps there's synergy with the MARI.

Defensive or escape tunnels in the event of emergency.

A source for underground water resource or aquifers.

And lastly potential mining rights.

Paperclipped said:
The team's steady progress at a Kagome pace has cleared the first room, about thirty-five meters deep, and identified two tunnels leading out of it. One leads eastwards, vaguely towards Leaf, while the other seems to go deeper under the ground. Both have been sealed.

As I said before, these western caverns might be connected or linked to Leafs tunnel system or provides low hanging fruit to an extensive underground transport network to and from Leaf seems promising. There's also obvious defensive military uses to consider in terms of movement, or natural bunkers.

eaglejarl said:
The ground that formed it had been battered, rendered torn and jagged, then fused into glass.

eaglejarl said:
The earth was red and grey like ancient flesh with arteries of green and shocking blue swirled through it.

"Beautiful..." Kei whispered.

The two quotes above seem to indicate that quartz and iron are present there. Although these are usually not as attractive to go after as gold, the extensive reach of the caverns could result in easier efforts to mine rather than repeated gold-extrations. It's also more opsec friendly than the gold extractions Hazou will have to personally look into.

eaglejarl said:
Unfortunately, the caverns are empty of anything larger than a vole. The shades are gone."

This should make it easier to inspect the caverns at the clans leisure.

strange_person · May 6, 2024

DanZapman said:
Without commenting on the rest, we've gone over civilian-operable X being a bad idea and I don't think this changes the calculus there. Civilians being irrelevant to ninja warfare is a large factor in them not being used as cannon fodder. If they start being able to use any form of seal or rune the motive now exists to use them for cannon fodder with combat seals or runes.

Yeah, fair enough. How about a sort of "Tunneler's Friend equivalent" which needs a ninja to toggle it on or off, and help restock it when the harvest comes in, but while active, processes stored grain into flour continuously at a rate calculated to keep a village of known size decently fed?
Another useful design would be pulling in water from a conic area, leaving contaminants behind, then squirting it out the opposite side as a fountain which can be aimed by pivoting the rune. That could turn into an all-in-one solution for irrigating fields, disease prevention, converting sewage into desiccated (thus higher value-per-weight, plus hopefully inoffensive-smelling) fertilizer, maybe even emergency flood control and/or radical speedup of sea salt harvesting.

Halberdier · May 6, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
I don't see a particular reason to visit the chakra caves right now. What's the case for doing so? It seems like something we would want to do right before Hazou unstagnates.

We can pre-emptively clear the barrier before stagnation happens though, yeah?
Main case for doing so is that if it gets us more clone hours due to more Chakra if Noburi is incapacitated some day, and/or it makes it easier for us to ES all day and still have Chakra for shadow clones (cave water bonus and ES rework pending, of course). Plus, it makes Kagome and Kei better summoners/combatants, and Kei DOES need to unstagnate combat.

Sir Stompy · May 6, 2024

Velorien said:
Thankfully, it's been long enough that some of the gemstone money has started coming in. While most of the money should be earmarked for the Kurusu and Tsunade, Mari has helpfully liberated some of it to ease the otherwise razor-thin Gōketsu balance sheets. The estate-construction fund is still empty, the Ministry's coffers are still misappropriated, and the Ministry and road missions are still suspended, but the GED and seal bank continue to operate, and Gaku has even authorized a very small amount of till-n-fill subsidies.

Unfortunately, the clan is still dealing with some loans, and the mortgage on the gold mine isn't getting any cheaper. Overall, the situation is stable, but still pretty poor.

The Gōketsu Clan does not currently have the liquidity to pay Tsunade.

We're not going to specify the exact equipment drawdowns, but the Team Akane Seal Bank multiplies the equipment available to clanless genin many times over. As a reminder, one of Asuma's conditions for the operation of the Seal Bank was that you only serve clanless genin, and that the seals given out in this way be marked not for resale. The demand is currently manageable by Shinji alone, but he works on it full-time.

Okay this is bad enough that I think we do need to go gold-mining.

I plan to update my plan accordingly. I will cut the research section and insert a gold mining section before we go to our research skybase.

Any of my voters @Noumero @acidshill object to this?

Velorien · May 6, 2024

Cariyaga said:
@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped

Can prep days differentiate which of a set of sealing/rune ideas is easiest? Or is that something we have to TIAFO?

Each prep day only gives you information about a seal or rune in isolation. It will not give you the relative difficulty of two seals or runes.

Orisha91 · May 6, 2024

[X] Action Plan: Leavetaking

@Sir Stompy With Shinji taking on more work for the Akane seal bank, could you add a line ordering Kazushi to work on the other genin seals like earth bullet seal or the tip-toeing seal?

Sir Stompy · May 6, 2024

Orisha91 said:
[X] Action Plan: Leavetaking

@Sir Stompy With Shinji taking on more work for the Akane seal bank, could you add a line ordering Kazushi to work on the other genin seals like earth bullet seal or the tip-toeing seal?

Why? I'm good with him just doing the notes he hasn't finished yet.

roobee · May 6, 2024

Thought oro would be more excited about resurrrection/immortality.

Orisha91 · May 6, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
Why? I'm good with him just doing the notes he hasn't finished yet.

I thought we could throw him a bone and get some use out of him out of taking on some of the easy J-seals. Not opposed to him finishing oro notes first to push him past being a low-chunin tier sealmaster.

Sir Stompy · May 6, 2024

Orisha91 said:
I thought we could throw him a bone and get some use out of him out of taking on some of the easy J-seals. Not opposed to him finishing oro notes first to push him past being a low-chunin tier sealmaster.

What's the benefit of him learning them? We plan to use them for veterancy but not as actual useful combat seals. (To my knowledge anyway).

The seals I want him to learn are Oro's silence array and holographic array (cannot be bothered to look up the official names rn) so that we can use them on our skytower. But he might fail those.

Personally I'd rather he finish up the notes ASAP so we can assign him some chunin-with-notes seals to learn.

Buggy · May 6, 2024

Rune of ~~Monkey-Patch~~ Hot Pocket
(Cooler name ~~pending~~ acquired)

Runes are cool and epic. They make giant explosions and alter reality! They're the lost art of the Sage, and only us and Vivisection Georg know what they can do! But they also can't seem to move around at all, and convincing our enemies to stand on that big red X is surprisingly difficult.

Seals are neat. They make little explosions, and we can carry a bunch. But they've been done to death by all the other sealmasters; finding something new and useful that they can do is a real challenge.

Clearly, we need to combine the two. Seals can move, runes are strong. Take the strengths, leave the weaknesses. Make a rune that makes a seal powerful.

Of all the paths we could explore, storage seals are a good start. They're intended to carry stuff for later, and we've got experience weaponizing them.

I suggest the following two runes to start out with:

Rune of Monkey Patch
- To use this rune, place a filled storage seal atop it, and then activate it.
- The storage seal's contents are lightly modified by the rune; heating is a good option, but any change that is innocuous and verifiable is acceptable.
- The contents of the storage seal are not exposed or returned to the world, not even briefly. The storage seal functions as normal afterwards.
Heating Rune of Monkey Patch
- Behaves similarly to the prior rune.
- Strongly heats the contents of the storage seal.
- Yield estimates (approximate, work not shown for brevity)
  - 100 kelvin heating: Explosive seal equivalent (0.5kg tnt)
  - 1000 kelvin heating: Low-yield explosive rune equivalent (~100kg tnt)
  - 10,000 kelvin heating: Surpasses explosive rune (~1 ton tnt)

Further runes could be added for, e.g. compression, sealing in compressed air a-la implosion seals, adding more content to a storage seal, luring a Out Entity into the storage seal to take a nap, etc. But this is a good start.

If anyone wants to help calculate the actual explosion created by heating 100kg of water to so-and-so degrees, I'd appreciate it. It's a nontrivial problem.

Sir Stompy · May 6, 2024

Buggy said:
To use this rune, place a filled storage seal atop it, and then activate it.

The storage seal's contents are lightly modified by the rune; heating is a good option, but any change that is innocuous and verifiable is acceptable.

Are storage variants acceptable targets for this seal? Eg. Macerators, filled implosion seals etc.

Which modification is Hazou attempting to research at this time? Heat? Is it set at infusion?

Buggy · May 6, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
Are storage variants acceptable targets for this seal? Eg. Macerators, filled implosion seals etc.

They could be? It shouldn't matter too much, however; using a Macerator instead of a vanilla Storage Seal would have little benefit. Should I write down something specific in the proposal?

Sir Stompy said:
Which modification is Hazou attempting to research at this time? Heat? Is it set at infusion?

Heating seems the most viable avenue at this time. If anyone has a better suggestion for the initial proof of concept rune than 'heat', or if Hazopilot has some idea for it, then that could be substituted. Let me know if I should change that. Ultimately the #1 seal is just to demonstrate that the 'opens up a storage seal and does stuff' concept works, so it just needs to do literally anything safe that can be verified.

Sir Stompy · May 6, 2024

Buggy said:
Heating seems the most viable avenue at this time. If anyone has a better suggestion for the initial proof of concept rune than 'heat', or if Hazopilot has some idea for it, then that could be substituted. Let me know if I should change that

Temperature seems like a better fit to me. Raising the "heat" seems like a strange thing to do physically.

Temperature, pressure, volume, internal energy, etc. All seem like good things, of which temperature is conceptually the easiest to understand.

Buggy said:
They could be? It shouldn't matter too much, however; using a Macerator instead of a vanilla Storage Seal would have little benefit. Should I write down something specific in the proposal

Actually I think grinding up the contents would be pretty useful, remember that the prototypal stored object is a cask of water, so grinding up the cask seems like it has potential to be useful.

If you want this to go into implosion nuke territory than designing the runes to work with filled implosion seals seems like a requirement.

RandomOTP · May 6, 2024

Velorien said:
The demand is currently manageable by Shinji alone, but he works on it full-time.

As per Kazushi's interlude, aren't Kazushi and Shinji both working on the demand of the Akane Seal Bank --except on days where Hazou asks for Kazushi's help with sealing research?

Nebulus · May 6, 2024

[X] Action Plan: Leavetaking

Sir Stompy said:
Just prior to departure, have Canvass check the team for any scent-based markers.

shouldn't the check be once the team's out of leaf? If they get scent-marked as they leave, they'd be done for.

Velorien said:
Unfortunately, the clan is still dealing with some loans, and the mortgage on the gold mine isn't getting any cheaper. Overall, the situation is stable, but still pretty poor.

Oof. Yeah, let's make some money for the clan.

Velorien said:
The demand is currently manageable by Shinji alone, but he works on it full-time.

I kinda feel bad for anyone doing such a boring job. Couldn't the clan get a couple more sealcrafters to help him out, so he doesn't spend all his time on chores?

Buggy · May 6, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
Temperature seems like a better fit to me. Raising the "heat" seems like a strange thing to do physically.

It seems synonymous? "Heats the contents", "Raises the temperature of the contents". Did I use a verb as a noun somewhere?

Sir Stompy said:
Actually I think grinding up the contents would be pretty useful, remember that the prototypal stored object is a cask of water, so grinding up the cask seems like it has potential to be useful.

If you want this to go into implosion nuke territory than designing the runes to work with filled implosion seals seems like a requirement.

I mean I have no problem with adding a 'works with all storage seal variants' to it, except that it might raise the difficulty of the rune. I suppose we could try superheating the contents of a implosion seal and see where that leads, but I'm not sure that'll strictly be better than just superheating a ton of water. Water specific heat>Air specific heat. Unless implosion ~~runes~~ seals hold a much greater mass of air.

Certainly, if the water is heated vastly beyond the boiling point, the cask won't matter. It'll become a fine spray of shards regardless.

edit: fixed that

_The_Bomb · May 6, 2024

Velorien said:
The Internet tells me that the latter is a Prince of Tennis character. Would he be able to present a suitable challenge to a homicidal ninja and her even more homicidal axe?

Better

RandomOTP · May 6, 2024

Given the state of the Clan Finances, I say we work on the gold mine + make more gemstones + sell a mountain of iron ore to the Tower after we leave Leaf. Leaf is in an iron shortage, and the Tower would pay top dollar for it.

eaglejarl · May 6, 2024

Simon_Jester said:
Reading that plan-evaluating checklist, I can't help but grin, imagining that every one of those rules represents a separate and independent instance of someone going "WELP, SHOULDA THOUGHT OF THAT."

Ayup. I can remember some of the incidents that caused that list. :>

strange_person said:
As another angle for improving nutrition, how about a variant storage seal - or better yet a civilian-operable rune - specifically optimized for long-term grain stockpiles? Maybe with a free side-order of threshing (storing only the edible parts, leaving empty husks behind), milling (via carefully tuned application of storage stress), and dispensing the resulting flour in standard quantities.
Ideally, could have it keep track of IDs and adjust behavior based on how full it is. Something like...
99%+: when grain is added, dispense an equal amount of flour immediately to avoid overloading
80-98%: anybody who's lived nearby for at least a week can take as much flour as they like, one kg at a time
60-79%: anybody who's personally loaded grain into the input hopper can withdraw up to twice that much flour
40-59%: siege rationing, weekly per-person limit is kg = consecutive months living nearby
0-39%: famine rationing, weekly per-person limit is 5 kg for everyone

I note that macerators already exist and (ponwog) would do the milling work quite well so long as they were set to very low ejection velocity so you don't end up with aerosolized flour. Doesn't have the full value you're talking about here, but it gets you part of the way.

Orisha91 · May 6, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
What's the benefit of him learning them? We plan to use them for veterancy but not as actual useful combat seals. (To my knowledge anyway).

The seals I want him to learn are Oro's silence array and holographic array (cannot be bothered to look up the official names rn) so that we can use them on our skytower. But he might fail those.

Personally I'd rather he finish up the notes ASAP so we can assign him some chunin-with-notes seals to learn.

Gotcha. He's got maceraters, so earth bullet isn't necessary. I like the plan you have for him. Only addition I'd add is tip toe, which should help with exfiltration and evasion.

Noumero · May 6, 2024

Buggy said:
It seems synonymous? "Heats the contents", "Raises the temperature of the contents". Did I use a verb as a noun somewhere?

@Sir Stompy is being pedantic. Formally speaking, heat is a measure of the flow of energy between objects as a function of their temperature difference.

Sir Stompy · May 6, 2024

Buggy said:
It seems synonymous? "Heats the contents", "Raises the temperature of the contents". Did I use a verb as a noun somewhere?

Tell that to my statistical mechanics professor.

Heat isn't really something you can raise. Internal energy, yes. Temperature? Yes.

You can add enthalpy, but you don't raise it.

I think it's conceptually simplest to raise the temperature.

Noumero said:
@Sir Stompy is being pedantic. Formally speaking, heat is a measure of the flow of energy between objects as a function of their temperature difference.

I wouldn't call it pedantry. Since "heat" is actually conceptually pretty complicated. But fine, whatever.

Sir Stompy · May 6, 2024

Orisha91 said:
Gotcha. He's got maceraters, so earth bullet isn't necessary. I like the plan you have for him. Only addition I'd add is tip toe, which should help with exfiltration and evasion.

Tip Toe? Does anyone have a link?

Noumero · May 6, 2024

Sir Stompy said:
I wouldn't call it pedantry. Since "heat" is actually conceptually pretty complicated. But fine, whatever.

I agree that heat is conceptually complicated. However, in the colloquial usage, "raise the heat" and "raise the temperature" are synonyms, and it seems pretty clear that @Buggy was using "heat" colloquially (since, well, "raising the formal!heat" would indeed be some abstract gobbledygook, so it should've seemed unlikely that they meant that).

I am now overly pedantically arguing that you were overly pedantic. Can we go higher still up the ladder of meta?

Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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