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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Adhoc vote count started by eaglejarl on Nov 4, 2017 at 7:21 PM, finished with 74493 posts and 18 votes.
  • 28
    [X] Shikaku hears about Kagome's conspiracy theories
    [X] The Death of Shikigami
    [X] Philosophizing About Punching But Not Actually Punching
    [x] Punching
    [X] A family-fun outing into the deeper levels of the Goketsu basement!
    [X] Kagome hears about Shikaku's conspiracy theories
    [X] Shikaku and Kagome subtly exchange conspiracy theories over go and tea
    [X] Storage seal tests on spoons.
    [X] Interlude: Hazo invents a seal that turns the entire universe into paperclips.
    [x] interlude: team Ishara and team uplift get lunch
    [X] Ninja Academy Syllabus
    [x] Shikaku and Kagome hear about each other's conspiracy theories
    [x] Shikaku and Kagome meet in a hyuuga-proofed room to warn each other about important hazards, Mari watches with increasing incredulity
    [X] Spoon consuming tests on storage seals.
    [X] Hazou and Guy Talk About YOUTH
    [X] Punching philosophers but not actually philosophizing.
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All right, so, I'm in the mid to late 60s, chapter-wise, and I've been getting confused by all these Omakes and weird formatting.

What happened to Yuno? I've been going over the chapters again and again but I seem to have lost my place. In what chapter does Noburi say goodbye to her?
 
Rule 6 Violation - Links to actual pornography are not permitted.
Diablo Snowblind said:
All right, so, I'm in the mid to late 60s, chapter-wise, and I've been getting confused by all these Omakes and weird formatting.

What happened to Yuno? I've been going over the chapters again and again but I seem to have lost my place. In what chapter does Noburi say goodbye to her?
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Noburi broke up with her in chapter NO.
 
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Diablo Snowblind said:
All right, so, I'm in the mid to late 60s, chapter-wise, and I've been getting confused by all these Omakes and weird formatting.

What happened to Yuno? I've been going over the chapters again and again but I seem to have lost my place. In what chapter does Noburi say goodbye to her?
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Click to shrink...
If you don't want to be confused by the Omake, I suggest reading from the story only thread. The main thread is super cluttered.
 
Diablo Snowblind said:
All right, so, I'm in the mid to late 60s, chapter-wise, and I've been getting confused by all these Omakes and weird formatting.

What happened to Yuno? I've been going over the chapters again and again but I seem to have lost my place. In what chapter does Noburi say goodbye to her?
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Click to shrink...
Welcome, new person! Nice to have you here.

Yeah, we should move the Omake into the 'Apocryphal' section.
 
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Canon(?): Chosen for the Grave, Part 2
  • Sidestory
    • Chosen for the Grave, Part 2​

    Soooooo...remember that part where we'd been camping in the Coat Room Between Worlds for a few weeks now, tossing our poop through the portal into ninja-deathworld-land and hoping that the portal didn't open into the Hokage's office?

    You see where this is going, right?

    Now, remembering that the universe is an evil, evil thing that considers it of vital importance to make us as miserable as possible, what might be worse than "you have been flinging poop into the Hokage's office for weeks now?"

    A delusional optimist might suggest, "You have been flinging poop on the Hokage's desk for weeks now?"

    A more realistic and genre-savvy person would suggest, "You flung poop on the Hokage and there are tons of ninja waiting to massacre you all?"

    Ah, if only things were that delightful.

    A truly paranoid pessimist might guess: "There is a time gradient from the Coat Room Between Worlds to NinjaDeathlandia, so what has been weeks for you has been only a second or two for NinjaDeathlandia. You thought that you were flinging poop through the portal every day or so, but from his perspective it was a series of poop-bullets, all aimed at him."

    So adorable.

    Apparently there was in fact a time gradient. It was rather sharper than our nonexistent and insufficiently paranoid pessimist had counterfactually guessed; it had not been a 'second or two', it had been a millisecond or two. Had we been flies on the wall watching all this, we probably would have seen something like:

    T=0: Sarutobi Hiruzen, Third Hokage of Konohagakure, The Professor, God of Shinobi, sensei of the Legendary Three, is sitting calmly, doing paperwork and occasionally sipping his tea.

    T=1ms: A glowing gold portal opens in front of his desk.

    T=2ms: A bucket-worth of poo and pee comes flying through the portal, only to hang virtually motionless in the air. Only sophisticated instruments would have allowed one to notice that it was inching ever so slowly forward.

    T=3ms: Another bucket-worth comes behind the first.

    T=4ms: Another bucket-worth comes behind the second.

    T=5ms: Etc.

    T=12-ish ms: Ninja reflexes, enhanced with the utter bullshit that is chakra, allow Hiruzen to react far faster than a normal human; his head comes up, turning towards the light spilling from the new feature of his office. His eyes begin to widen at the sight of it, and at the steadily-growing pillar of human waste that is simultaneously inching lethargically towards him and flying at him at ridiculous speed in a fine example of how relativity can screw with you. He opens his mouth to shout an order or activate a jutsu, but his words are dopplered into subhumanly deep registers.

    T=14-ish ms: The pillar of poo hits him. (Remember that part about his mouth being open? Yeah, not his day. Not ours either.)

    T=15-ish ms: The three of us step out of the portal with an utter lack of gorm.

    "Don't shoot, we're friendly!" I said before I'd even cleared the exit. It seemed like a good idea just on general principles; if there was no one here then it was a funny joke to share with the others. If there was someone here then maybe it would prevent them from attacking. And if there was someone here and it didn't prevent them from attacking then we had bigger problems anyway.

    'Bigger problems' such as, for example, a pair of ANBU charging at us. One was a slim young woman in a cat mask with her fists wreathed in flames. The other was male and essentially a cube of muscle with the mask of a bull.

    I absorbed this information in a flash and immediately reacted, my heroic reflexes moving my body without conscious direction in what my hindbrain felt was the optimal survival strategy.

    "Gaaah!" I shouted.

    Fortunately for all of us, Val was on the ball. It's possible that he'd already thought through the 'what is the worst thing that could happen?' question and been better prepared than me or Oli; he tended to be good at that. Regardless, his hands were already cutting seals when he stepped out of the portal.

    "Suijin-Heki Suiton!" he shouted, and a tidal wave of water poured from his mouth, knocking our attackers back. The water hit the far wall and splashed, tossing us in the opposite direction. The portal had winked out the instant that Oli's back heel cleared the plane, so instead of being thrown out of the universe we were just slammed into the far wall. The room was already waist-deep by the time my shoulders hit the wall, a fact I discovered when I lost my balance and went under. I came up with icy panic running down my back, because all the seals I'd been carrying in hand and on my vest had just been ruined. I desperately hoped that the water hadn't made it into my pack and destroyed all of my backup supply.

    Val was busy keeping the flood jutsu going, sweeping his head back and forth between the ANBU and the Hokage. I was busy worrying how I was going to survive the next few seconds with all seals destroyed, leaving me useless because of course I hadn't gotten the 'know all the jutsu' or 'reality-warping spreadsheets' bullshit abilities. No, I needed to actually work for my superpowers. Rassa frassa stupid desires of stupid heart and stupid firey demon stupidhead.

    "We're friendly!" Oli shouted over the waterfall roar of Val's jutsu. "We aren't here to fight! We're really sorry about the poop; it was an accident!"

    Hiruzen and the two ANBU had all hopped up on the surface of the water and were splitting up; Cat came straight at us while Bull strafed left and Hiruzen went right. The room was big for an office, maybe forty feet on a side and ten feet high, but ninja move fast.

    Oli was waving his hands around like a madman, presumably doing something spreadsheet-related. I was very, very slowly (or so it felt), trying to claw my backpack around to where I could reach in and grab some seals. Val was cutting more handseals. None of us were going to be fast enough.

    "We can save Biwako!" Val shouted, dropping his jutsu.

    The entire room instantly became a tableau; Hiruzen's fist was a millimeter away from Val's temple and his right leg was upraised, deflecting Cat's fist into the wall beside my head. Bull, very slightly slower than the other two, had had a few extra steps in which to react and therefore managed to stop his own kick without interference from his commander. Instead of staving Oli's ribs in and blasting his spine through the wall he was simply holding my friend pinned and unable to breathe.

    "Go on," Hiruzen said calmly.

    "Your wife died after helping Uzumaki Kushina give birth to Naruto, on the the night that the Fourth Hokage sealed the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox into the boy," Val said quickly. "We can bring her back. And your father, Sarutobi Sasuke. And pretty much anyone you've ever known, as long as their soul is in the Pure Land instead of in the belly of the Shinigami or something like that." He paused. "That lets out the Fourth, sorry."

    "At what price?"

    Val licked his lips nervously, but refused to stop meeting Hiruzen's eyes. "It requires someone give up their life, but there's no reason you couldn't use a terminally ill person, or a death row inmate."

    Oli was wheezing, trying desperately to suck in a breath and feebly pushing at Bull's leg. He might as well have been pushing on a concrete pillar.

    "You are talking about the Edo Tensei," Hiruzen said. "It is a forbidden technique. It does not actually restore the person, merely a shadow of them. They lack the power of the original and much of that person's knowledge as well."

    "There is an improved version," Val said. "Two of them, actually. The best was, or maybe will be, created by Yakushi Kabuto. I know it brings the person back at full power. I don't know about their knowledge, but I have no reason to think that they aren't completely themselves. Orochimaru said that Senju Hashirama could break free if he wanted to."

    "What do you mean it will be created by Kabuto?"

    Val paused. "That's complicated," he said. "I'm happy to tell you everything I know, but it will take a little while. Also, we have a lot of seals and jutsu that we'd like to give you. We're interested in joining Konoha and would like to make the village as strong as we can."

    Hiruzen thought about that for a moment, then lowered his leg and his fist. Cat and Bull pulled back at the same time, leaving us standing up to our waists in water with the three of them standing atop it, looking down on us.

    It's a petty thing, but I'm not comfortable being looked down upon. I'm six foot three, so it's not a thing that happens to me a lot and it feels weird when it does. The water was leaking out of the room slowly, presumably under the door if not other places, but their ninja water-walking abilities allowed them to loom like nobody's business. (Granted, their massively overpowered ninja skills didn't hurt.) Still, I put both hands on the surface and pushed chakra through them, lifting myself onto the surface.

    ...only to promptly lose the pattern of the chakra I was emitting and fall face-first back into the water. I came up, spluttering and absolutely certain that all of my seals, and all of my sealing supplies, were ruined.

    "Clean them up and take them to conference room four," Hiruzen said, not batting an eye at my pratfall. "As long as they cooperate, don't hurt them."

    I groaned and slogged through the water towards the door.
     
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  • Sidestory
    • The top vote was for the Death of Shikigami, which I was actually pretty excited to write. Unfortunately, there was just no juice in the tank for figuring out anything complicated. CftG is my go-to for zero-effort writing in the MfD-verse so I did this instead; sorry for that.

    This chapter has the same unstated canonicity as the first chapter.
     
    eaglejarl said:
    Chosen for the Grave, Part 2​

    Soooooo...remember that part where we'd been camping in the Coat Room Between Worlds for a few weeks now, tossing our poop through the portal into ninja-deathworld-land and hoping that the portal didn't open into the Hokage's office?

    You see where this is going, right?

    Now, remembering that the universe is an evil, evil thing that considers it of vital importance to make us as miserable as possible, what might be worse than "you have been flinging poop into the Hokage's office for weeks now?"

    A delusional optimist might say, "You have been flinging poop on the Hokage's desk for weeks now?"

    A more realistic and genre-savvy person would say "You flung poop on the Hokage and there are tons of ninja waiting to massacre you all?"

    Ah, if only things were that delightful.

    A truly paranoid pessimist might guess: "There is a time gradient from the Coat Room Between Worlds to NinjaDeathlandia, so what has been weeks for you has been only a second or two for NinjaDeathlandia. You thought that you were flinging poop through the portal every day or so, but from his perspective it was a series of poop-bullets, all aimed at him."

    So adorable.

    Apparently there was in fact a time gradient. It was rather sharper than our nonexistent and insufficiently paranoid pessimist had counterfactually guessed; it had not been a 'second or two', it had been a millisecond or two. Had we been flies on the wall watching all this, we probably would have seen something like:

    T=0: Sarutobi Hiruzen, Third Hokage of Konohagakure, The Professor, God of Shinobi, sensei of the Legendary Three, is sitting calmly, doing paperwork and occasionally sipping his tea.

    T=1ms: A glowing gold portal opens in front of his desk.

    T=2ms: A bucket-worth of poo and pee comes flying through the portal, only to hang virtually motionless in the air. Only sophisticated instruments would have allowed one to notice that it was inching ever so slowly forward.

    T=3ms: Another bucket-worth comes behind the first.

    T=4ms: Another bucket-worth comes behind the second.

    T=5ms: Etc.

    T=12-ish ms: Ninja reflexes, enhanced with the utter bullshit that is chakra, allow Hiruzen to react far faster than a normal human; his head comes up, turning towards the light spilling from the new feature of his office. His eyes begin to widen at the sight of it, and at the steadily-growing pillar of human waste that is simultaneously inching lethargically towards him and flying at him at ridiculous speed in a fine example of how relativity can screw with you. He opens his mouth to shout an order or activate a jutsu, but his words are dopplered into subhumanly deep registers.

    T=14-ish ms: The pillar of poo hits him. (Remember that part about his mouth being open? Yeah, not his day. Not ours either.)

    T=15-ish ms: The three of us step out of the portal with an utter lack of gorm.

    "Don't shoot, we're friendly!" I said before I'd even cleared the exit. It seemed like a good idea just on general principles; if there was no one here then it was a funny joke to share with the others. If there was someone here then maybe it would prevent them from attacking. And if there was someone here and it didn't prevent them from attacking then we had bigger problems anyway.

    'Bigger problems' such as, for example, a pair of ANBU charging at us.

    One was a slim young woman in a cat mask with her fists wreathed in flames. The other was male and essentially a cube of muscle with the mask of a bull. Floating over the head of each one was a paragraph of text:

    ANBU Operative Level ??​
    The Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai (literally 'Dark Side') are the elite of Konoha's jōnin, Special Operations troops who do the most important, most dangerous missions. Between death-defying adventures they guard the Hokage, mostly to prevent him from being bothered by minor annoyances and to save him the trouble of having to look up from his paperwork in order to personally kill suicidal idiots assassins.

    I absorbed this information in a flash and immediately reacted, my heroic reflexes moving my body without conscious direction in what my hindbrain felt was the optimal survival strategy.

    "Gaaah!" I shouted.

    Fortunately for all of us, Val was on the ball. It's possible that he'd already thought through the 'what is the worst thing that could happen?' question and been better prepared than me or Oli; he tended to be good at that. Regardless, his hands were already cutting seals when he stepped out of the portal.

    "Suijin-Heki Suiton!" he shouted, and a tidal wave of water poured from his mouth, knocking our attackers back. The water hit the far wall and splashed, tossing us in the opposite direction. The portal had winked out the instant that Oli's back heel cleared the plane, so instead of being thrown out of the universe we were just slammed into the far wall. The room was already waist-deep by the time my shoulders hit the wall, a fact I discovered when I lost my balance and went under. I came up with icy panic running down my back, because all the seals I'd been carrying in hand and on my vest had just been ruined. I desperately hoped that the water hadn't made it into my pack and destroyed all of my backup supply.

    Val was busy keeping the flood jutsu going, sweeping his head back and forth between the ANBU and the Hokage. I was busy worrying how I was going to survive the next few seconds with all seals destroyed, leaving me useless because of course I hadn't gotten the 'know all the jutsu' or 'reality-warping spreadsheets' bullshit abilities. No, I needed to actually work for my superpowers. Rassa frassa stupid desires of stupid heart and stupid firey demon stupidhead.

    "We're friendly!" Oli shouted over the waterfall roar of Val's jutsu. "We aren't here to fight! We're really sorry about the poop; it was an accident!"

    Hiruzen and the two ANBU had all hopped up on the surface of the water and were splitting up; Cat came straight at us while Bull strafed left and Hiruzen went right. The room was big for an office, maybe forty feet on a side and ten feet high, but ninja move fast.

    Oli was waving his hands around like a madman, presumably doing something spreadsheet-related. I was very, very slowly (or so it felt), trying to claw my backpack around to where I could reach in and grab some seals. Val was cutting more handseals. None of us were going to be fast enough.

    "We can save Biwako!" Val shouted, dropping his jutsu.

    The entire room instantly became a tableau; Hiruzen's fist was a millimeter away from Val's temple and his right leg was upraised, deflecting Cat's fist into the wall beside my head. Bull, very slightly slower than the other two, had had a few extra steps in which to react and therefore managed to stop his own kick without interference from his commander. Instead of staving Oli's ribs in and blasting his spine through the wall he was simply holding my friend pinned and unable to breathe.

    "Go on," Hiruzen said calmly.

    "Your wife died after helping Uzumaki Kushina give birth to Naruto, on the the night that the Fourth Hokage sealed the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox into the boy," Val said quickly. "We can bring her back. And your father, Sarutobi Sasuke. And pretty much anyone you've ever known, as long as their soul is in the Pure Land instead of in the belly of the Shinigami or something like that." He paused. "That lets out the Fourth, sorry."

    "At what price?"

    Val licked his lips nervously, but refused to stop meeting Hiruzen's eyes. "It requires someone give up their life, but there's no reason you couldn't use a terminally ill person, or a death row inmate."

    Oli was wheezing, trying desperately to suck in a breath and feebly pushing at Bull's leg. He might as well have been pushing on a concrete pillar.

    "You are talking about the Edo Tensei," Hiruzen said. "It is a forbidden technique. It does not actually restore the person, merely a shadow of them. They lack the power of the original and much of that person's knowledge as well."

    "There is an improved version," Val said. "Two of them, actually. The best was, or maybe will be, created by Yakushi Kabuto. I know it brings the person back at full power. I don't know about their knowledge, but I have no reason to think that they aren't completely themselves. Orochimaru said that Senju Hashirama could break free if he wanted to."

    "What do you mean it will be created by Kabuto?"

    Val paused. "That's complicated," he said. "I'm happy to tell you everything I know, but it will take a little while. Also, we have a lot of seals and jutsu that we'd like to give you. We're interested in joining Konoha and would like to make the village as strong as we can."

    Hiruzen thought about that for a moment, then lowered his leg and his fist. Cat and Bull pulled back at the same time, leaving us standing up to our waists in water with the three of them standing atop it, looking down on us.

    It's a petty thing, but I'm not comfortable being looked down upon. I'm six foot three, so it's not a thing that happens to me a lot and it feels weird when it does. The water was leaking out of the room slowly, presumably under the door if not other places, but their ninja water-walking abilities allowed them to loom like nobody's business. (Granted, their massively overpowered ninja skills didn't hurt.) Still, I put both hands on the surface and pushed chakra through them, lifting myself onto the surface.

    Water Walking unlocked! Critical Fail! flashed in front of my vision, just as I lost the pattern of the chakra I was emitting and fell face-first back into the water. I came up, spluttering and absolutely certain that all of my seals, and all of my sealing supplies, were ruined.

    "Clean them up and take them to conference room four," Hiruzen said, not batting an eye at my pratfall. "As long as they cooperate, don't hurt them."

    Quest Accepted: Blending with the Leaves!​
    You have convinced Sarutobi Hiruzen not to kill you...for now! Convince him not to do so at all. Bonus Objective: Earn Konoha citizenship!

    I groaned and slogged through the water towards the door.
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    What is Valentine doing there? Also he'd totally just use chakra boosted Aikido rather than jutsu.
     
    Jello_Raptor said:
    What is Valentine doing there? Also he'd totally just use chakra boosted Aikido rather than jutsu.
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    Valerian is Velorien's real name. (At least, in the world of Chosen for the Grave. No comment on its accuracy in Borington.)


    EDIT: In case anyone is wondering: The video game elements seemed like a good idea at the time, but I decided I didn't like them and have axed them.
     
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