Testing. Testing. Is this thing on? Now read that back to me… Good.
Initial test of the...
Initial test of the...
Dance Puppet Dance! (Transhumanist Naruto OC)
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Testing. Testing. Is this thing on? Now read that back to me… Good.
Initial test of the Audio Diary Mk… One? I guess prototypes don't count. Test of the Audio Diary Mk-1 is a success. The date is, umm, about seven years after I was born. I don't think there's any sort of unified dating system. Probably just 'second year of the reign of the third Kazekage' or something like that.
Will update as projects progress.
Record.
Date: two days from last message.
Subject: Results of chakra study
Previously I had gotten a firm grasp of wall walking down, tried to replace water with loose sand with poor results, and moved onto threads. Threads have good form, maximum range of ten meters, working on getting more simultaneously. Progress slow.
Efforts to manipulate the mixing of yin and yang chakra started to show progress. Risk of psychological body rejection, autoimmune disorder or other conflict between soul and body is impossible to discount at this time. The distinction between the flavors of energy is too strong, much more so than is supposed to be the case for chakra users.
Date: A week from last message
Subject: Analysis of ninja puppets
Main flaws of mundane prosthetics are missing, tensile strength/flexibility issue is absent due to the use of chakra reinforcement. The simplification of the puppet forms seems to be due to the lack of need for muscles, pistons or rotors to induce motion. Ball joints give greatest flexibility, and henge spells can replicate form better than greater complexity ever could.
Flaws are most obviously the threads, reliance on human forms, distance limitations from puppeteer, lack of jutsu. The biggest weakness is that they rely on threads to function. I'll need to overcome that one if I want to exploit this bit of magitech.
Copying Pein's method is unworkable, I'd need a satellite. Many jutsu use external control over one's own chakra to control things, extending this principle to the puppets may work. It's also possible that using puppets as phylacteries may be possible.
Will perform tests to see.
Date: Three days from last record
Subject: Results of remote puppetry tests
Marking weighted companion cubes with a bit of chakra and then manipulating them at range is significantly more difficult than using a connecting thread. The range issue becomes prohibitive very quickly. Pein used some kind of pulse, possibly a wave-form, but replication was not possible there due to the lack of an apparent underlying logic structure to chakra.
Chakra seems largely subjective, due to the inclusion of the spiritual aspect to give it essence. This would could possibly then be described as mythopoetic, belief shaping reality, depending on how nature chakra fits into things. The construction of various tools and magic weapons seems to confirm this though.
Date: A week later
Subject: Results of Yin chakra for remote puppets.
Operating under the assumption that people like Konan and Suigetsu that can turn into an elemental form to fast-travel do so by changing the chakra in their bodies into elemental chakra, and then recreating themselves at the other end, I attempted to extend pure yin chakra into a puppet and form a bond with it as if it were a body that I was reforming.
The results were minimal yet promising. Sensation was absent, no eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue, inner-ear, chakra coils, nothing to allow for the senses, but a telekinetic sense of presence did exist. I was not able to move the cube more than a tiny amount, but that seems likely to be due to issues with the yin chakra and the binding to the object than to the process itself.
Date: 43 days since last record
Subject: Progress on Yin possession of puppets
I managed to get fairly good at separating out pure yin chakra, probably a lot easier for me since I don't have the habit of mixing them together, nor are the yin and yang energies fully drawn to each other here. So it was really just a matter of figuring out the process of getting really pure samples, without any contaminants. Side note, intentional separation of these energies could cause acceleration of any mutual rejection of soul/body.
Possession based on bonding with the puppets has a major stumbling block, in the form of elemental understanding. For forming the actual human body it's easy, it's the natural form, but when people shift into paper or dirt, then they have to have a really good affinity trained for it. A strong understanding of the material.
Puppets have a lot of wood and metal in them, and obviously more complex puppets will have a wider variety of materials. This approach is likely a dead end. However, given that sealing is directly related to barriers, to kekkai, and not to just being able to do whatever random bullshit the author wants, and given that there are known instances of both sealing souls and separating souls from bodies, I bet that forming a cage for a bit of yin chakra would not be too hard.
Date: two weeks since
Subject: Kekkai
Strong similarities to talismanic magic, script is generally Chinese seal-script, probably a cosmic joke that. Main emphasis is on the concepts used by the script and the additional artistry to represent the flow of energy.
Limitations are that the field is generally restricted to sealing things in or walling them off. Greater power requires greater complexity, as chakra is bound through the characters. Yin is both bound into the seal and represented on the seal via the characters written there. Kanji used generally represent pretty crisp imagery, but it is possible that other approaches might result in a more effective approach with better black-boxing.
Date: I think it's been two days, sorry I'm pretty tired
Subject: That thing I was working on… the semi soul jars
So, um, been working hard the last couple of days, haven't gotten much sleep. Creating a closed system so that yin chakra wouldn't keep on being absorbed after insertion was a pain. Also had to block off external access so that they couldn't be compromised in battle.
Feels a bit like having an extra limb, there's a sensation of there being something external that can be manipulated, but it's very tricky to work out at times what it is. The insomnia is partly related to that, the new sensation is really hard to ignore, it'll probably be worse when I put working senses on the puppets.
Date: Ugh, I don't even know. Too sick.
Subject: Sensors
Took the basic mic system from my Audio Diary Mk-1 and inserted them for ears. Not sure what to do about eyes, cameras did exist in the show, but they're schizo-tech. The rapid progression from flashbulb photography in the early eps to digital monitors in the last ones is too unrealistic for any form of actual technological progression. If such things are real then they must either be summoning or salvaging them from some other source.
If I just had a Byakugan eye, then I could see how it *ha!* sees via chakra alone. I'm hilarious. Even one from a dead Branch member would do, since the Caged-Bird seal hasn't been changed since time immemorial, and during the clan wars they didn't exactly have microscopes with which to inspect the pattern of chakra nodes present in the retina.
As for the rest… I don't even know. Ugh. What I wouldn't give for some etherlite right about now. Zelretch~ Zelretch~ Send a plot device to save my ass! … No? Nothing?
What about whatever method shadow clones used to copy senses? But no, those are functionally just a bubble of chakra projected out from the pattern of the soul. Although… if I'm already doing something similar with how I'm controlling the puppets, then it stands to reason that just by having my chakra there, thinking that it's a body and responding in the way it's used to will actually allow it to do what I want. After all, ghosts and other pure-yin constructs can see and hear just fine.
Date: The last record was about three months back I think
Subject: The soul as a reactive substance
I managed to get the first test successfully completed not long after my last recording, but my leg started to get infected and I had to get it amputated. I suspect that this confirms my earlier assessment about the possibility that my soul and body were in direct conflict.
I will probably have accelerate my schedule so that something like heart attack, organ failure or coma don't catch me before I become unbound. The rejection seems to be accelerating the more I work on this.
My puppet, with the full senses, was up online the while time I was in the hospital, moving my consciousness over wasn't too hard, but without the issues of a meat-brain interfering with the smooth operation of my chakra-brain my ability to multi-task improved dramatically. Not sure if I would be safe here if my body died though.
Wood is used for building puppets because it's organic and allows for good chakra flow, but it's extremely expensive in the desert. Metal works too, but not as well, and it's much harder to shape than just putting wood on a lathe. Clay would have worked, but the water needed to whet is just as rare as wood. I considered using fabric coated with polymers, but all the resins I could find were plant based, and thus just as rare as anything else.
Accounting for all current variables, I was forced to use the old reliable wood for the time being. Ultimately the whole process is really irritating. Making wooden puppets is easy, making ninja puppets is bullshit hard. You have to plan out every little nick and cranny ahead of time so that you don't make any mistakes. Measure twice, cut one doesn't even begin to do it.
Given the inability to guarantee by body's longevity, I'll need to start work on a kekkai to separate my soul from my body and seal it into a puppet. Basically like one I saw in the show, where a strategist desk-ninja totally owned a grizzled old ANBU captain.
Shouldn't be too difficult. The premise is a lot like what I'm already using, but with the addition of severing the connection between mind and body permanently.
Date: Umm, 14d, 2h, 32m, 15s since last recording… Yeah right, as if.
Subject: Failsafe
I have ghost rats running in my room. They're hilarious. Pretty simple way to test the effectiveness of my process really, though the overlap to get the souls stuffed into an inanimate object took a bit of doing. There are a few rat puppets around with self-inflicted shattered spines, the wood splinters are going to be a pain to clean up.
The puppet I'm hoping to have host me is getting ready. I managed to grab the basics behind how the puppeteers mask the faces and joints so well. A lot of it is a variation of the simple 'cloak of invisibility technique', more of a basic method for getting chakra to change the colors of light to cause wide scale illusions that can't be dispelled with a simple 'kai'. Though for some reason no one ever bothered to figure out how mouths work here. Not that it really matters, simpler to have no active mouth at all really, then the sense of uncanny valley is lesser.
Do I need a heart like Sasori? Wasn't that just the result of him replacing bits one at a time, using the Broken Ax Paradox so that he stayed alive all the time until there was just one piece left? Do I really need yang chakra, and if so how would I get it? I mean, having jutsu is nice, but a giant bulls eye of a heart would kind of make immortality pointless.
I could... do what Fuuka did, but with less tongue. Essentially piggyback a connection through my soul onto some animals, creating a constant drain of their vitality. I wouldn't have to pay any attention to those bodies, wouldn't have to contest their souls, just act as a harmless little parasite that didn't pay any extra attention all. There aren't a lot of animals that I can use at the moment, aside from those rats.
Date: faster, faster, skip it, skip it
Subject: skip it!
I can feel my arm starting to go to sleep, I have shortness of breath, abnormal heartrate and chest pains. I can't afford to wait any longer.
The process should be all ready for activati-
*bang* Wait! Don't do activate that, it's a sacrificial jutsu. You're committing suicide!
Heh, wouldn't be the first time.
*chichichichichichi-fwoosh*
Date: Unknown
Subject: Intrusion
What is all this?
Some kind of forbidden puppetry experimentation it looks like. Blending souls and puppets to some unknown end.
Can you speculate as to the purpose?
A puppet army with independent action, or immortality would be my guess. Shuzaku was brilliant, but for his frail body he would have easily been a match for my grandson.
He was terminal you know.
That probably explains it then. He was seeking a way to escape his lot in life.
Any chance he succeeded?
…I'm not sure. I don't know how long it might take for a soul to recover from this kind of jutsu. *rustle* You can see that the seals on this puppet are active and compressed, but that might have just sucked in his chakra and not his soul.
See what you can figure out from this room.
Yes Kazekage-sama.
Date: Unknown
Subject: Intrusion
Do you know what kind of code it's in?
No sir. It appears to be a totally separate language. We've manage to pick up a few words we can recognize, specific names and titles, but fitting those into a coherent context seems impossible. Even just understanding the basic grammar is causing nothing but frustration, he seems to have intentionally left it half done and contradicted himself in order to stymie any attempt at decoding it.
What recognizable words does it mention?
Hm, let me see. Your title once, lots of references to jutsu, chakra, yin and yang, kekkai, a mention of the byakugan, henge, and a few names that don't seem to correspond to anyone of note.
I see… That seems to suggest a common research journal, but keep working to see if you can link anything up with some of his former projects.
Transferring recordings to new hub.
Transferring.
Transferring..
Transferring…
Transferred
So he might regain consciousness. Will he be of any use on the battlefield?
I can't say just yet. Without a living body to gauge off of it's incredibly difficult to get an idea of his health and wellbeing. I would say however that the chances are good.
War's on the horizon, if we can have an indestructible killing machine on the field then it will greatly increase our chances.
He's not indestructible. No more than any other puppet.
He can be damaged, but not injured, he has all the strengths of a puppet and none of the weaknesses.
It is as you say Kazekage-sama. However, he was never trained as a shinobi, he may not be ready for active duty like the others his age.
Nonsense, if he can build shinobi tools like this then he must have studied the nindo thoroughly on his own, he'll be ready.
! Note to self... Conquer the world.
AN: Not sure if I want to continue with this or not. I mostly started writing it because I was bored, then got interested because of the odd perspective, pretty sure it's 2nd person. I almost lost interest because I looked at the Naruto wiki too much, that world just got more and more irrational as it went on. I really just have always wanted to see a puppetry story where the guy actually sheds his body.
Tell me what you think.
Initial test of the Audio Diary Mk… One? I guess prototypes don't count. Test of the Audio Diary Mk-1 is a success. The date is, umm, about seven years after I was born. I don't think there's any sort of unified dating system. Probably just 'second year of the reign of the third Kazekage' or something like that.
Will update as projects progress.
Record.
Date: two days from last message.
Subject: Results of chakra study
Previously I had gotten a firm grasp of wall walking down, tried to replace water with loose sand with poor results, and moved onto threads. Threads have good form, maximum range of ten meters, working on getting more simultaneously. Progress slow.
Efforts to manipulate the mixing of yin and yang chakra started to show progress. Risk of psychological body rejection, autoimmune disorder or other conflict between soul and body is impossible to discount at this time. The distinction between the flavors of energy is too strong, much more so than is supposed to be the case for chakra users.
Date: A week from last message
Subject: Analysis of ninja puppets
Main flaws of mundane prosthetics are missing, tensile strength/flexibility issue is absent due to the use of chakra reinforcement. The simplification of the puppet forms seems to be due to the lack of need for muscles, pistons or rotors to induce motion. Ball joints give greatest flexibility, and henge spells can replicate form better than greater complexity ever could.
Flaws are most obviously the threads, reliance on human forms, distance limitations from puppeteer, lack of jutsu. The biggest weakness is that they rely on threads to function. I'll need to overcome that one if I want to exploit this bit of magitech.
Copying Pein's method is unworkable, I'd need a satellite. Many jutsu use external control over one's own chakra to control things, extending this principle to the puppets may work. It's also possible that using puppets as phylacteries may be possible.
Will perform tests to see.
Date: Three days from last record
Subject: Results of remote puppetry tests
Marking weighted companion cubes with a bit of chakra and then manipulating them at range is significantly more difficult than using a connecting thread. The range issue becomes prohibitive very quickly. Pein used some kind of pulse, possibly a wave-form, but replication was not possible there due to the lack of an apparent underlying logic structure to chakra.
Chakra seems largely subjective, due to the inclusion of the spiritual aspect to give it essence. This would could possibly then be described as mythopoetic, belief shaping reality, depending on how nature chakra fits into things. The construction of various tools and magic weapons seems to confirm this though.
Date: A week later
Subject: Results of Yin chakra for remote puppets.
Operating under the assumption that people like Konan and Suigetsu that can turn into an elemental form to fast-travel do so by changing the chakra in their bodies into elemental chakra, and then recreating themselves at the other end, I attempted to extend pure yin chakra into a puppet and form a bond with it as if it were a body that I was reforming.
The results were minimal yet promising. Sensation was absent, no eyes, ears, skin, nose, tongue, inner-ear, chakra coils, nothing to allow for the senses, but a telekinetic sense of presence did exist. I was not able to move the cube more than a tiny amount, but that seems likely to be due to issues with the yin chakra and the binding to the object than to the process itself.
Date: 43 days since last record
Subject: Progress on Yin possession of puppets
I managed to get fairly good at separating out pure yin chakra, probably a lot easier for me since I don't have the habit of mixing them together, nor are the yin and yang energies fully drawn to each other here. So it was really just a matter of figuring out the process of getting really pure samples, without any contaminants. Side note, intentional separation of these energies could cause acceleration of any mutual rejection of soul/body.
Possession based on bonding with the puppets has a major stumbling block, in the form of elemental understanding. For forming the actual human body it's easy, it's the natural form, but when people shift into paper or dirt, then they have to have a really good affinity trained for it. A strong understanding of the material.
Puppets have a lot of wood and metal in them, and obviously more complex puppets will have a wider variety of materials. This approach is likely a dead end. However, given that sealing is directly related to barriers, to kekkai, and not to just being able to do whatever random bullshit the author wants, and given that there are known instances of both sealing souls and separating souls from bodies, I bet that forming a cage for a bit of yin chakra would not be too hard.
Date: two weeks since
Subject: Kekkai
Strong similarities to talismanic magic, script is generally Chinese seal-script, probably a cosmic joke that. Main emphasis is on the concepts used by the script and the additional artistry to represent the flow of energy.
Limitations are that the field is generally restricted to sealing things in or walling them off. Greater power requires greater complexity, as chakra is bound through the characters. Yin is both bound into the seal and represented on the seal via the characters written there. Kanji used generally represent pretty crisp imagery, but it is possible that other approaches might result in a more effective approach with better black-boxing.
Date: I think it's been two days, sorry I'm pretty tired
Subject: That thing I was working on… the semi soul jars
So, um, been working hard the last couple of days, haven't gotten much sleep. Creating a closed system so that yin chakra wouldn't keep on being absorbed after insertion was a pain. Also had to block off external access so that they couldn't be compromised in battle.
Feels a bit like having an extra limb, there's a sensation of there being something external that can be manipulated, but it's very tricky to work out at times what it is. The insomnia is partly related to that, the new sensation is really hard to ignore, it'll probably be worse when I put working senses on the puppets.
Date: Ugh, I don't even know. Too sick.
Subject: Sensors
Took the basic mic system from my Audio Diary Mk-1 and inserted them for ears. Not sure what to do about eyes, cameras did exist in the show, but they're schizo-tech. The rapid progression from flashbulb photography in the early eps to digital monitors in the last ones is too unrealistic for any form of actual technological progression. If such things are real then they must either be summoning or salvaging them from some other source.
If I just had a Byakugan eye, then I could see how it *ha!* sees via chakra alone. I'm hilarious. Even one from a dead Branch member would do, since the Caged-Bird seal hasn't been changed since time immemorial, and during the clan wars they didn't exactly have microscopes with which to inspect the pattern of chakra nodes present in the retina.
As for the rest… I don't even know. Ugh. What I wouldn't give for some etherlite right about now. Zelretch~ Zelretch~ Send a plot device to save my ass! … No? Nothing?
What about whatever method shadow clones used to copy senses? But no, those are functionally just a bubble of chakra projected out from the pattern of the soul. Although… if I'm already doing something similar with how I'm controlling the puppets, then it stands to reason that just by having my chakra there, thinking that it's a body and responding in the way it's used to will actually allow it to do what I want. After all, ghosts and other pure-yin constructs can see and hear just fine.
Date: The last record was about three months back I think
Subject: The soul as a reactive substance
I managed to get the first test successfully completed not long after my last recording, but my leg started to get infected and I had to get it amputated. I suspect that this confirms my earlier assessment about the possibility that my soul and body were in direct conflict.
I will probably have accelerate my schedule so that something like heart attack, organ failure or coma don't catch me before I become unbound. The rejection seems to be accelerating the more I work on this.
My puppet, with the full senses, was up online the while time I was in the hospital, moving my consciousness over wasn't too hard, but without the issues of a meat-brain interfering with the smooth operation of my chakra-brain my ability to multi-task improved dramatically. Not sure if I would be safe here if my body died though.
Wood is used for building puppets because it's organic and allows for good chakra flow, but it's extremely expensive in the desert. Metal works too, but not as well, and it's much harder to shape than just putting wood on a lathe. Clay would have worked, but the water needed to whet is just as rare as wood. I considered using fabric coated with polymers, but all the resins I could find were plant based, and thus just as rare as anything else.
Accounting for all current variables, I was forced to use the old reliable wood for the time being. Ultimately the whole process is really irritating. Making wooden puppets is easy, making ninja puppets is bullshit hard. You have to plan out every little nick and cranny ahead of time so that you don't make any mistakes. Measure twice, cut one doesn't even begin to do it.
Given the inability to guarantee by body's longevity, I'll need to start work on a kekkai to separate my soul from my body and seal it into a puppet. Basically like one I saw in the show, where a strategist desk-ninja totally owned a grizzled old ANBU captain.
Shouldn't be too difficult. The premise is a lot like what I'm already using, but with the addition of severing the connection between mind and body permanently.
Date: Umm, 14d, 2h, 32m, 15s since last recording… Yeah right, as if.
Subject: Failsafe
I have ghost rats running in my room. They're hilarious. Pretty simple way to test the effectiveness of my process really, though the overlap to get the souls stuffed into an inanimate object took a bit of doing. There are a few rat puppets around with self-inflicted shattered spines, the wood splinters are going to be a pain to clean up.
The puppet I'm hoping to have host me is getting ready. I managed to grab the basics behind how the puppeteers mask the faces and joints so well. A lot of it is a variation of the simple 'cloak of invisibility technique', more of a basic method for getting chakra to change the colors of light to cause wide scale illusions that can't be dispelled with a simple 'kai'. Though for some reason no one ever bothered to figure out how mouths work here. Not that it really matters, simpler to have no active mouth at all really, then the sense of uncanny valley is lesser.
Do I need a heart like Sasori? Wasn't that just the result of him replacing bits one at a time, using the Broken Ax Paradox so that he stayed alive all the time until there was just one piece left? Do I really need yang chakra, and if so how would I get it? I mean, having jutsu is nice, but a giant bulls eye of a heart would kind of make immortality pointless.
I could... do what Fuuka did, but with less tongue. Essentially piggyback a connection through my soul onto some animals, creating a constant drain of their vitality. I wouldn't have to pay any attention to those bodies, wouldn't have to contest their souls, just act as a harmless little parasite that didn't pay any extra attention all. There aren't a lot of animals that I can use at the moment, aside from those rats.
Date: faster, faster, skip it, skip it
Subject: skip it!
I can feel my arm starting to go to sleep, I have shortness of breath, abnormal heartrate and chest pains. I can't afford to wait any longer.
The process should be all ready for activati-
*bang* Wait! Don't do activate that, it's a sacrificial jutsu. You're committing suicide!
Heh, wouldn't be the first time.
*chichichichichichi-fwoosh*
Date: Unknown
Subject: Intrusion
What is all this?
Some kind of forbidden puppetry experimentation it looks like. Blending souls and puppets to some unknown end.
Can you speculate as to the purpose?
A puppet army with independent action, or immortality would be my guess. Shuzaku was brilliant, but for his frail body he would have easily been a match for my grandson.
He was terminal you know.
That probably explains it then. He was seeking a way to escape his lot in life.
Any chance he succeeded?
…I'm not sure. I don't know how long it might take for a soul to recover from this kind of jutsu. *rustle* You can see that the seals on this puppet are active and compressed, but that might have just sucked in his chakra and not his soul.
See what you can figure out from this room.
Yes Kazekage-sama.
Date: Unknown
Subject: Intrusion
Do you know what kind of code it's in?
No sir. It appears to be a totally separate language. We've manage to pick up a few words we can recognize, specific names and titles, but fitting those into a coherent context seems impossible. Even just understanding the basic grammar is causing nothing but frustration, he seems to have intentionally left it half done and contradicted himself in order to stymie any attempt at decoding it.
What recognizable words does it mention?
Hm, let me see. Your title once, lots of references to jutsu, chakra, yin and yang, kekkai, a mention of the byakugan, henge, and a few names that don't seem to correspond to anyone of note.
I see… That seems to suggest a common research journal, but keep working to see if you can link anything up with some of his former projects.
Transferring recordings to new hub.
Transferring.
Transferring..
Transferring…
Transferred
So he might regain consciousness. Will he be of any use on the battlefield?
I can't say just yet. Without a living body to gauge off of it's incredibly difficult to get an idea of his health and wellbeing. I would say however that the chances are good.
War's on the horizon, if we can have an indestructible killing machine on the field then it will greatly increase our chances.
He's not indestructible. No more than any other puppet.
He can be damaged, but not injured, he has all the strengths of a puppet and none of the weaknesses.
It is as you say Kazekage-sama. However, he was never trained as a shinobi, he may not be ready for active duty like the others his age.
Nonsense, if he can build shinobi tools like this then he must have studied the nindo thoroughly on his own, he'll be ready.
! Note to self... Conquer the world.
AN: Not sure if I want to continue with this or not. I mostly started writing it because I was bored, then got interested because of the odd perspective, pretty sure it's 2nd person. I almost lost interest because I looked at the Naruto wiki too much, that world just got more and more irrational as it went on. I really just have always wanted to see a puppetry story where the guy actually sheds his body.
Tell me what you think.
Last edited:
Awakening Woes
- Location
- US
Date: Uuuuugh
Subject: Fuuuck me figuratively.
You're awake! That was extremely foolish of you… though in context I can somewhat understand why you did it.
Puppeteers tend to gravitate towards changing their bodies a bit over time, but you went and did the whole thing at once. My grandson will be so envious.
Ah, where's my head? Do you remember your name or recognize where you are?
… Shuzaku, of Suna, this looks like the hospital.
What was that pause there? Are you sure you're alright?
I was trying to make a face of incredulity, but this body is a prototype, can't make facial expressions.
Oh, that's alright then. It might be a good idea to upgrade some of the parts of your body, assuming you can.
Would that be allowed? I assumed that if discovered I'd be treated more as research material than an actual asset.
Since you're clearly skilled in the art of Kugutsu you've been drafted into the Puppet Brigade. You know, it's odd that you developed your skill in the way you did, it's similar to a jutsu I was trying to develop to bring puppets to life.
I see. So I take it that war is soon to be upon us then.
Of course. Such is ever the life of a shinobi.
What kind of resources will I have? Private workshop, budget?
Brigade member's quarters double as their workshops, but they all get private quarters because of that. Resources are communal to the brigade, so don't waste too much of it.
I understand ma'am. When can I be released, and will I be getting the stuff from my previous workshop back?
Normally we'd keep you for observation for a few days at least, but without the normal frailty of a human body there's really no way we can excuse having you occupy a valuable hospital bed for so long. Your things are already at the Brigade barracks, they were moved there for inspection, so you can have them back as soon as you move in.
Before I head out, could I get a cloak, with something to cover my face and eyes, maybe sunglasses?
Huh?
People react badly to those that appear too different, my dead eyes and lack of expression will draw too much attention to me, generally of the negative sort.
You can fix that with a simple jutsu you know.
I've already learned that one, but I'm unsure as yet if I can even use jutsu, and I don't want to test it until I get my equipment back first.
I'll get them.
Date: Same day as before
Subject: Results of process to become unbound
According to Chiyo I was out for about two weeks.
Overall, I'd say that so far my plan to shed my mortal coil was a remarkable success, I can even still switch my consciousness out to the other puppet.
Looks like they actually didn't fuck around too much with my stuff. Surprising. Normally shinobi will stick their grubby little paws into things no matter how out of their depth it is.
Hm, this is junk, don't need this anymore, junk, trash, useless. I could probably still use these plans. Is there any use for an army of robotic rodents? Probably. Just not much of one if I stuffed them with rodent souls.
*clatter*
Being unbound is so liberating, don't need my bed anymore, so I just got a whole lot more open floor space right there, don't really need the shower either so I can shove some stuff in bathroom as I please since I'll never really use it.
Oh right! Plans.
Check to see what the resources available to me are, find out if there's a requisition form for other materials I may want to experiment with. See how I can improve my new body, get the basic jutsu up and working. Probably meet the rest of the Brigade, and see if I can crib some blueprints off of them for inspiration.
Well, there's one thing I can do right now. I need a mirror for this. Start with an image of the face I want, and then rework it from there… Eh, good enough. Not going to be scarring anyone for life anyway.
Date: Next evening
Subject: Incompetence
The storage only has wood, metal and assorted materials, nothing interesting or unique. There's apparently no method to get unique materials aside from using your own money and the Puppet Brigade don't share designs!
Alright, I kind of get that last one. Proprietary information, hiding trump cards and all that, but still. They don't even defunct designs they could hand out?
What am I saying. Of course they don't. This is the group that used the Karasu design for forty years without changing it a bit, the same group that used the White Secret technique as the ultimate trump for over a century. No wonder Sasori ditched them, they didn't understand the concept of innovation, but then again, if there's one lesson the show loves the nail into the heads of its avid fans it's that innovation is always inferior to tradition. That's why Orochimaru was the weakest of the Akatsuki despite having the firmest grasp of chakra, and why Madara was able to clone Hashirama's cells when those with actual scientific and medical backgrounds could not.
Pfffu haaaaaaaa. Deep breaths.
Let's review. I can't really do the standard type of puppet design because all the inner workings are a pain and I don't have the background in engineering to pull it off. Nor do I really have all that good of an ability to picture things in three dimensions, I'm not fucking Tesla!
What does that leave me? How can I survive, nay dominate, the battlefield if I don't have the normal 'trap-puppets' to rely upon?
Well… I can use birds, and other small animal forms. I can instantly know what different puppets can see, so my ability to communicate information across battlefields and war-fronts is unmatchable.
But wait. Can I still levitate puppets even without strings? Didn't Deidara do something similar, levitating his clay birds, which must have weighed at least several tonnes, to make them fly? Huh, if manipulating an object by injecting your own chakra into it is all it takes to allow for flight, then wouldn't it be true that regular shinobi could fly at will? That's… really weird.
Anyway, tabling that for later. Assuming that multi-tasking increases with the number of bodies available, like Skitter, then manufacturing rates will only stop being prohibitive after I have a few dedicated production bodies online that can engage in assembly line and economies of scale style manufacturing. Not necessarily for human sized bodies, but more for insects, rodents and birds.
Um, but that kind of manufacturing requires a lot of specialty metal tools, puppeteers do use a lot of unique metal bits and pieces, but I never learned how they got them. Even some of the simplest things seen on the show would take days of effort, even if you had a plasma cutter, sheet metal, power hammer, grinder, and everything else as modern and efficient as possible. A lot of the other things, such as perfectly smooth metal ball joints that are effectively ball bearings, are completely beyond their level of technology altogether.
Ok, that's the next thing I need to learn. How the Brigade does metal crafting.
Date: Four days since awakening
Subject: Metal working
Don't I feel like an idiot. Ten times out of ten, if a puppeteer does something you can't quite explain the answer is going to be chakra strings. Get the metal to liquid temperatures, shove a couple of strings to it and use the inherent telekinesis to shape it. Of course the metal isn't properly tempered, and I don't think they really even bother a lot of the time, but between reinforcement and how disposable a lot of the weapons are, it often doesn't even matter.
I wish I knew how to make plastics. Hm, but chakra is very similar to certain styles of magic, and most magical practices don't do well with using plastics. If we follow that train of thought along, then the best materials as measured by conductivity would probably be human body parts… interesting. And in a game of chakra, conductivity wins, since the more you can reinforce something the more damage it can take.
Well, it might be possible to refine something specific, effectively similar to ritually prepared materials. Grow a tree using pure yang chakra infusion, drain its sap for resin, infuse that into threads made from the hairs of summons to be interlaced into a solution of bone-porcelain that uses the ash of the bones of Kaguya clan members. Or something like that. It'd be incredibly involved, not something to use for an expendable battle puppet.
Of course, at this point most of my hypothesis about chakra have little to no support in the real work, they're just rationalizations regarding a fictional anime designed for children. So it's entirely possible that reality will turn out to be quite different in the end.
Date: twelve days since awakening
Subject: Manufacturing
Made a new puppet, optimized for production and assembly. If I can't still implant a piece of my yin chakra into this to control it remotely then I'm going to feel really silly.
Kekkai array is set, seals activate in 3… 2… 1… Locked. All systems check. Senses – good, motion – good, multitasking – good, bond to body – all good.
Next on my to do list, I need to go buy some birds to study avian bone structure and biology. Not sure what kinds of birds are available, they might not be a major food item here, in which case only the messenger and hunting birds would be commonly available, and both of those would be rather expensive.
I could wing it… still got it, but no, bone structures aren't really intuitive from just an external examination of an animal. How much similarity does it really have to have to living birds though? If the joints will have greater flexibility and the wings don't need airfoil designs to fly, then wouldn't it be the case that just something vaguely bird-shaped would work just as well? But would I even want something so crude as one of my designs? I mean, in theory there's nothing stopping me from just taking just about any random thing that making it act like a puppet, but the utility depends entirely on the design itself.
Ok, so what would imitating nature more closely give me that simplification would not? More fuel efficiency for one, with airfoil wings that allow for natural lift the cost of maneuvering the puppets for hours or days on end would be significantly reduced or even eliminated. Also, less chance of being discovered and having the puppets destroyed, something too obviously unnatural would be eliminated as a matter of principle.
Date: Fourteen days since awakening
Subject: Weapons
If I'm to go into combat, as is almost a certainty at this point, then I'll need a weapon that I can use reliably. The first thing that springs to mind is a rope dart. Whips, rope darts, meteor hammers, chains, they've always been unpopular because they're difficult to control and users get a lot of injuries during training, but if I effectively treat the tool as a puppet or as an extension of my puppet body, then I'll have complete freedom of use with it and none of that will be a problem.
The main reason of course is that I really want to capture my enemies and use them for experiments, but only having a non-lethal weapon on hand isn't a viable option.
I did consider something like razor-floss, similar to what shows up in Hellsing and other shows, but there are two problems, first is that actual wires don't cut like that without a great deal of momentum behind them, and it would be a lot simpler to figure out how to make chakra stings that were just converted into wind natures chakra. I read about that in a story once.
Maybe when I have more time I will try to make something better, like some kind of projectile weapon or something, but I'm on a serious deadline here. I have no idea when I'm going to be shipped to the front lines and the Kazekage has long since seen me as fit for duty despite the fact that I only have a few regular puppets and no real training.
I did consider making it like an electro-whip, but the problem was that as far as I could figure lightning is not electricity. Lighting was a piercing element, it doesn't have amps or any of those other things, that's why people in the show never get killed from simple contact, they don't get burns, they don't get blown away from the jolt. So unless I want a whip that would act more like a spear, adding a lighting element attack to it would be pretty useless.
Date: eighteen days since awakening
Subject: Birds
Got a few types of birds from the market the other day. For bone structure I think I'm going to focus more on the neck, wings and neck. The torso being given shape with an internal lattice structure that could be filled with explosives or other materials, possibly as a way to foul water sources.
Three major bones for the legs, seven for the wings, seven for the feet, eleven for the neck plus the skull. Though of course the legs, feet and wings would have to be doubled up due to symmetry.
Once I ripped apart a few carcasses it was pretty simple to get the right bone shapes outlined, and then creating mockups for the prototype. Now I just need to basically leave part of my mind to passively churn out a few dozen of these things and put them together.
Date: twenty seven days after awakening
Subject: Deployment
Talk about timing. I just barely got my birds done and I've gotten my deployment orders. I feel like that guy in Starship Troopers "war, war, we're going to war!", that makes Konoha the Arachnids and Iwa the Skinnies.
I got some training in with my whip, figured out a few things I can do with it. I had to completely ignore anything I'd ever seen about the weapon in the past, because I have no need to actually gain momentum, nor attack along rational curves and angles.
Fortunately I kind of anticipated moving out with little notice, so I premade some scrolls for my puppets. Even still, sealing away a few brace of scouting birds is pretty tedious.
I'm going to make sure to leave an extra puppet hidden in some out of the way spot, as a backup in case all my known bodies get destroyed.
AN: I'm taking Baughn's advice, especially about background events. I learned that Sasori wasn't in the Second World War like I thought, but rather the Third, which makes no sense to me at all, so I'm changing it. Sasori is a contemporary of the protagonist.
As for the protagonist himself, yes he will develop more interesting puppets, but he has to work up to it, he doesn't know how all these things work just yet, he never apprenticed under a puppeteer, never went to the academy. If he sees something cool in battle he'll take it, if one of the puppets breaks he'll salvage it.
Tell me what you think.
Subject: Fuuuck me figuratively.
You're awake! That was extremely foolish of you… though in context I can somewhat understand why you did it.
Puppeteers tend to gravitate towards changing their bodies a bit over time, but you went and did the whole thing at once. My grandson will be so envious.
Ah, where's my head? Do you remember your name or recognize where you are?
… Shuzaku, of Suna, this looks like the hospital.
What was that pause there? Are you sure you're alright?
I was trying to make a face of incredulity, but this body is a prototype, can't make facial expressions.
Oh, that's alright then. It might be a good idea to upgrade some of the parts of your body, assuming you can.
Would that be allowed? I assumed that if discovered I'd be treated more as research material than an actual asset.
Since you're clearly skilled in the art of Kugutsu you've been drafted into the Puppet Brigade. You know, it's odd that you developed your skill in the way you did, it's similar to a jutsu I was trying to develop to bring puppets to life.
I see. So I take it that war is soon to be upon us then.
Of course. Such is ever the life of a shinobi.
What kind of resources will I have? Private workshop, budget?
Brigade member's quarters double as their workshops, but they all get private quarters because of that. Resources are communal to the brigade, so don't waste too much of it.
I understand ma'am. When can I be released, and will I be getting the stuff from my previous workshop back?
Normally we'd keep you for observation for a few days at least, but without the normal frailty of a human body there's really no way we can excuse having you occupy a valuable hospital bed for so long. Your things are already at the Brigade barracks, they were moved there for inspection, so you can have them back as soon as you move in.
Before I head out, could I get a cloak, with something to cover my face and eyes, maybe sunglasses?
Huh?
People react badly to those that appear too different, my dead eyes and lack of expression will draw too much attention to me, generally of the negative sort.
You can fix that with a simple jutsu you know.
I've already learned that one, but I'm unsure as yet if I can even use jutsu, and I don't want to test it until I get my equipment back first.
I'll get them.
Date: Same day as before
Subject: Results of process to become unbound
According to Chiyo I was out for about two weeks.
Overall, I'd say that so far my plan to shed my mortal coil was a remarkable success, I can even still switch my consciousness out to the other puppet.
Looks like they actually didn't fuck around too much with my stuff. Surprising. Normally shinobi will stick their grubby little paws into things no matter how out of their depth it is.
Hm, this is junk, don't need this anymore, junk, trash, useless. I could probably still use these plans. Is there any use for an army of robotic rodents? Probably. Just not much of one if I stuffed them with rodent souls.
*clatter*
Being unbound is so liberating, don't need my bed anymore, so I just got a whole lot more open floor space right there, don't really need the shower either so I can shove some stuff in bathroom as I please since I'll never really use it.
Oh right! Plans.
Check to see what the resources available to me are, find out if there's a requisition form for other materials I may want to experiment with. See how I can improve my new body, get the basic jutsu up and working. Probably meet the rest of the Brigade, and see if I can crib some blueprints off of them for inspiration.
Well, there's one thing I can do right now. I need a mirror for this. Start with an image of the face I want, and then rework it from there… Eh, good enough. Not going to be scarring anyone for life anyway.
Date: Next evening
Subject: Incompetence
The storage only has wood, metal and assorted materials, nothing interesting or unique. There's apparently no method to get unique materials aside from using your own money and the Puppet Brigade don't share designs!
Alright, I kind of get that last one. Proprietary information, hiding trump cards and all that, but still. They don't even defunct designs they could hand out?
What am I saying. Of course they don't. This is the group that used the Karasu design for forty years without changing it a bit, the same group that used the White Secret technique as the ultimate trump for over a century. No wonder Sasori ditched them, they didn't understand the concept of innovation, but then again, if there's one lesson the show loves the nail into the heads of its avid fans it's that innovation is always inferior to tradition. That's why Orochimaru was the weakest of the Akatsuki despite having the firmest grasp of chakra, and why Madara was able to clone Hashirama's cells when those with actual scientific and medical backgrounds could not.
Pfffu haaaaaaaa. Deep breaths.
Let's review. I can't really do the standard type of puppet design because all the inner workings are a pain and I don't have the background in engineering to pull it off. Nor do I really have all that good of an ability to picture things in three dimensions, I'm not fucking Tesla!
What does that leave me? How can I survive, nay dominate, the battlefield if I don't have the normal 'trap-puppets' to rely upon?
Well… I can use birds, and other small animal forms. I can instantly know what different puppets can see, so my ability to communicate information across battlefields and war-fronts is unmatchable.
But wait. Can I still levitate puppets even without strings? Didn't Deidara do something similar, levitating his clay birds, which must have weighed at least several tonnes, to make them fly? Huh, if manipulating an object by injecting your own chakra into it is all it takes to allow for flight, then wouldn't it be true that regular shinobi could fly at will? That's… really weird.
Anyway, tabling that for later. Assuming that multi-tasking increases with the number of bodies available, like Skitter, then manufacturing rates will only stop being prohibitive after I have a few dedicated production bodies online that can engage in assembly line and economies of scale style manufacturing. Not necessarily for human sized bodies, but more for insects, rodents and birds.
Um, but that kind of manufacturing requires a lot of specialty metal tools, puppeteers do use a lot of unique metal bits and pieces, but I never learned how they got them. Even some of the simplest things seen on the show would take days of effort, even if you had a plasma cutter, sheet metal, power hammer, grinder, and everything else as modern and efficient as possible. A lot of the other things, such as perfectly smooth metal ball joints that are effectively ball bearings, are completely beyond their level of technology altogether.
Ok, that's the next thing I need to learn. How the Brigade does metal crafting.
Date: Four days since awakening
Subject: Metal working
Don't I feel like an idiot. Ten times out of ten, if a puppeteer does something you can't quite explain the answer is going to be chakra strings. Get the metal to liquid temperatures, shove a couple of strings to it and use the inherent telekinesis to shape it. Of course the metal isn't properly tempered, and I don't think they really even bother a lot of the time, but between reinforcement and how disposable a lot of the weapons are, it often doesn't even matter.
I wish I knew how to make plastics. Hm, but chakra is very similar to certain styles of magic, and most magical practices don't do well with using plastics. If we follow that train of thought along, then the best materials as measured by conductivity would probably be human body parts… interesting. And in a game of chakra, conductivity wins, since the more you can reinforce something the more damage it can take.
Well, it might be possible to refine something specific, effectively similar to ritually prepared materials. Grow a tree using pure yang chakra infusion, drain its sap for resin, infuse that into threads made from the hairs of summons to be interlaced into a solution of bone-porcelain that uses the ash of the bones of Kaguya clan members. Or something like that. It'd be incredibly involved, not something to use for an expendable battle puppet.
Of course, at this point most of my hypothesis about chakra have little to no support in the real work, they're just rationalizations regarding a fictional anime designed for children. So it's entirely possible that reality will turn out to be quite different in the end.
Date: twelve days since awakening
Subject: Manufacturing
Made a new puppet, optimized for production and assembly. If I can't still implant a piece of my yin chakra into this to control it remotely then I'm going to feel really silly.
Kekkai array is set, seals activate in 3… 2… 1… Locked. All systems check. Senses – good, motion – good, multitasking – good, bond to body – all good.
Next on my to do list, I need to go buy some birds to study avian bone structure and biology. Not sure what kinds of birds are available, they might not be a major food item here, in which case only the messenger and hunting birds would be commonly available, and both of those would be rather expensive.
I could wing it… still got it, but no, bone structures aren't really intuitive from just an external examination of an animal. How much similarity does it really have to have to living birds though? If the joints will have greater flexibility and the wings don't need airfoil designs to fly, then wouldn't it be the case that just something vaguely bird-shaped would work just as well? But would I even want something so crude as one of my designs? I mean, in theory there's nothing stopping me from just taking just about any random thing that making it act like a puppet, but the utility depends entirely on the design itself.
Ok, so what would imitating nature more closely give me that simplification would not? More fuel efficiency for one, with airfoil wings that allow for natural lift the cost of maneuvering the puppets for hours or days on end would be significantly reduced or even eliminated. Also, less chance of being discovered and having the puppets destroyed, something too obviously unnatural would be eliminated as a matter of principle.
Date: Fourteen days since awakening
Subject: Weapons
If I'm to go into combat, as is almost a certainty at this point, then I'll need a weapon that I can use reliably. The first thing that springs to mind is a rope dart. Whips, rope darts, meteor hammers, chains, they've always been unpopular because they're difficult to control and users get a lot of injuries during training, but if I effectively treat the tool as a puppet or as an extension of my puppet body, then I'll have complete freedom of use with it and none of that will be a problem.
The main reason of course is that I really want to capture my enemies and use them for experiments, but only having a non-lethal weapon on hand isn't a viable option.
I did consider something like razor-floss, similar to what shows up in Hellsing and other shows, but there are two problems, first is that actual wires don't cut like that without a great deal of momentum behind them, and it would be a lot simpler to figure out how to make chakra stings that were just converted into wind natures chakra. I read about that in a story once.
Maybe when I have more time I will try to make something better, like some kind of projectile weapon or something, but I'm on a serious deadline here. I have no idea when I'm going to be shipped to the front lines and the Kazekage has long since seen me as fit for duty despite the fact that I only have a few regular puppets and no real training.
I did consider making it like an electro-whip, but the problem was that as far as I could figure lightning is not electricity. Lighting was a piercing element, it doesn't have amps or any of those other things, that's why people in the show never get killed from simple contact, they don't get burns, they don't get blown away from the jolt. So unless I want a whip that would act more like a spear, adding a lighting element attack to it would be pretty useless.
Date: eighteen days since awakening
Subject: Birds
Got a few types of birds from the market the other day. For bone structure I think I'm going to focus more on the neck, wings and neck. The torso being given shape with an internal lattice structure that could be filled with explosives or other materials, possibly as a way to foul water sources.
Three major bones for the legs, seven for the wings, seven for the feet, eleven for the neck plus the skull. Though of course the legs, feet and wings would have to be doubled up due to symmetry.
Once I ripped apart a few carcasses it was pretty simple to get the right bone shapes outlined, and then creating mockups for the prototype. Now I just need to basically leave part of my mind to passively churn out a few dozen of these things and put them together.
Date: twenty seven days after awakening
Subject: Deployment
Talk about timing. I just barely got my birds done and I've gotten my deployment orders. I feel like that guy in Starship Troopers "war, war, we're going to war!", that makes Konoha the Arachnids and Iwa the Skinnies.
I got some training in with my whip, figured out a few things I can do with it. I had to completely ignore anything I'd ever seen about the weapon in the past, because I have no need to actually gain momentum, nor attack along rational curves and angles.
Fortunately I kind of anticipated moving out with little notice, so I premade some scrolls for my puppets. Even still, sealing away a few brace of scouting birds is pretty tedious.
I'm going to make sure to leave an extra puppet hidden in some out of the way spot, as a backup in case all my known bodies get destroyed.
AN: I'm taking Baughn's advice, especially about background events. I learned that Sasori wasn't in the Second World War like I thought, but rather the Third, which makes no sense to me at all, so I'm changing it. Sasori is a contemporary of the protagonist.
As for the protagonist himself, yes he will develop more interesting puppets, but he has to work up to it, he doesn't know how all these things work just yet, he never apprenticed under a puppeteer, never went to the academy. If he sees something cool in battle he'll take it, if one of the puppets breaks he'll salvage it.
Tell me what you think.
Camping trip
- Location
- US
Date: twenty eight days after awakening
Subject: Forced march
Chiyo is on command of the Brigade, but she split us up into three units, each going to a separate country. My group is under a chunin names Sanji.
Even with chakra reinforcement, if I didn't have my puppet body I would probably have a seriously hard time keeping the required pace. Some of the younger puppeteers have been lagging behind.
The biggest problem with desert travel has always been hauling water with you. Yet storage seals make that a complete non-issue. That means that the real issue is that the pace is just too brutal. Maybe they should get on their puppet's backs and have them carry them all the way, that seems like an efficient solution.
Date: One month after awakening
Subject: Front lines
I don't think the war has technically started just yet. It's more like border tension, just waiting for the official word to come down that conflict will begin and where. In the show they only really mentioned the fighting in Ame, and that would naturally be one of the main staging grounds due to it's central location between three main villages, but with the battle-royale nature of these wars, it's almost a given that River, Frost, and possibly Noodle and Tea countries will get into the same kind of situation.
The alliances in the show were all very tenuous, likely not even having existed for all that long. Taki was a long time ally of Konoha, but they tried to assassinate the Shodame, Kusa was palling around with Iwa, but they will probably be hit badly during this current war.
As a guess, I'd say that countries with minor shinobi villages will be preferred battle grounds to ones without, that way they can be knocked down a couple of pegs during the fight and won't get any ideas of usurping the position of one of the big five during the refractory period.
Without any clear notion of who is going to attack whom first, the villages have to guard all their borders about evenly. That's why I'm in Claw country at the moment, in case Iwa decides to come around from the western flank. They could come from even further west, through Fang country, but that area's so barren that it's only use is as a geographical convenience and as a trade route to Mountain and Bear countries, as well as lands further afield, via the river that comes down out of the northern ranges.
The landscape reminds me of those iconic mountains from China, sheer, poking up randomly from the landscape and covered with dense greenery. It's a sharp contract from the desert where I was before.
I'll need to see about finding some animals to imitate here, the variety is sure to be much higher due to the greater plant life. Might want to start my human-puppet experiments with animals so as to practice with simplified chakra networks.
Date: One month two days since awakening
Subject: Acclimation
I told Sanji about my capabilities, the Brigade words semi independently from the rest of the troops, so it'll be a while before I can set up a communications network using puppets. I don't see why they didn't have me just send a puppet with each group to start with, it would have been easier.
But then, for a group whose bread and butter ought to be intel they all seem to have only a mediocre grasp of the value of intelligence gathering and counter intelligence.
Even in basic strategy, knowing the positions and strength of the enemy is more important than having a strong force to take them on. Too much reliance on over-powered individuals in the history of the Elemental Nations I think.
Whatever. I've been sending out puppet-birds to scout the country on my own. I'm not quite willing to actively spy out Iwa's encampment though, that could be seen as an act of aggression, and initiative which just so happens to spark a war is doubtless enough to get me executed… or dismantled, I guess it would be.
Yesterday I set up my manufacturing body in my tent which will allow me to use my main and auxiliary bodies to do other things.
Rounded up a couple of squirrels for dissection. Is there any extra benefit to vivisection? Hmm, maybe, if I'm trying to replicate working chakra networks, or creating hyper-realistic bodies, other than that I don't really think so.
Date: One month seven days since awakening
Subject: Rodent puppets
I remember I once played a Squirrel deck for MTG, everything was fine until it went off and then *bam!* everyone got fucked. The image of an infinite hoard of squirrels blanketing the land like a nation of army-ants was always a peculiar mix of hilarious and terrifying.
Too bad these little guys can't do the same, like little fuzzy Replicators.
I have considered trying to build things like nano-machines, but the problem is that I don't think I could use the same form of remote control to manipulate them. The key limitation for puppetry are how small an object you can latch onto with a thread, while the main limitation for my variant is how small an object can be inscribed with seals. There simply wouldn't be enough surface area for anything smaller than an insect, and even then it'd be next to impossible to get the seals drawn on, though I do have a few ideas about that.
Oi, Shuzaku! Stop talking that gibberish, you're up on patrol next.
On my way.
Date: One month thirteen days after awakening
Subject: Research update
I have looked into the chakra networks of the animals I've been able to capture. The implications are a bit odd really. The network manifests at the sub-dermis, not deeper in. This explains why Sasori only had to flay his cadavers to harvest what he needed.
The reasons for this are a bit unclear. My hypothesis however is that it's due to the way that the soul and body overlap. Since things without a physical body still retain the shape and dimensions of their body, it stands to reason that the external dimensions of the soul roughly approximate that of the original body. This possibly explains both my own body's rejection and some of the problems Orochimaru had with his possession system, since the soul doesn't overlap properly and thus does not act complimentarily with the body, instead creating an antagonism.
Of course, without the soul to provide the yin and living body to provide the yang, the coils are pretty much dead and useless. What I discovered was that the coils react based on a mix of trained habit and innate traits, when chakra is flushed through the coils at a controlled rate they behave as though active and change it according to the nature and style of the original user. Of course, with just a few animals to test things on I didn't really have any shocking results, no ninja squirrels were harmed in the making of this report, but all animals have some access to charka, and those instinctual abilities often manifest in peculiar ways, limited though they are.
The other thing I spent time on was insects. Five days ago I set out netting to catch some insects. After collecting my harvest I suffocated them and attached threads to one of their corpses, could have left them alive but there was no point and it would have made things harder.
I used the insect I controlled with a thread to draw on the needed seals for the other dead insects. That worked well. There are some unforeseen problems with the overall plan however. Insects are slow for long distance travel, they get blown severely off course, and can't be safely maneuvered above the tree line or updrafts are liable to move them to ridiculous places. I had twenty eight to start with, now I'm down to sixteen.
It now makes sense to be why the Aburame use themselves as mobile carriers, and why the bee users from Iwa use summons exclusively rather than mixing in other variants. I might have to mix things up a little, like filling the torso of one of my birds with hornet puppets or something.
Of course these little guys will be invaluable for urban intelligence and espionage, since no one really pays attention to houseflies, but overall they don't seem as useful as Skitter made them out to be, probably because I have to personally create every insect I want to use and can't just casually grab a few thousand from the surroundings.
Maybe arachnids would be of more use, though they'd need some kind of web-shooting jutsu to make up for the fact that they were dead or made of inorganic materials.
I did look into the chakra networks of the insects as well. It seemed to support my hypothesis, given that they were attached to the chitin and not deeper within the ichor. If the overlap points weren't important then it'd make more sense for them to focus on areas that had more life, rather than the dead chitin layer.
Date: One month twenty days since awakening
Subject: Boredom
It's true what they say, 90% boredom and 10% of varying forms of terror and death. I haven't exactly run out of things to research, but I'm more and more limited by the lack of resources.
Complained to Sanji about not knowing the basic jutsu, he was generally pretty pissed that he got handed such a liability, and that I hadn't reported that fact earlier. So now I have to work on the henge, body flicker, kawarimi and bunshin. I already have a pretty good background experience on the henge and bunshin just from how I disguise my puppet's exteriors, but the two travel ones are a new experience for me.
The kawarimi is the obviously the simples space-time jutsu around, which makes it easy to get the basics of but incredibly difficult to really master, while the shunshin is an incredibly simplistic straight line acceleration spell that is easy to use but hard to apply due to how limited it was.
I'm not sure how important hand-seals actually are. I mean, I know that they originate from the Kuji-in Mudra, the hand signs for the nine-cuts of esoteric Buddhism. There they are used as, not quite mnemonics, closer to innate symbols that represent esoteric ideas.
Symbolism is important for most magical styles, so if chakra really is using it as a basis it would make sense that the hand-seals were aids to get the soul to form the jutsu correctly. Correlative, not causative.
Fun fact I worked out about the kawarimi. I was playing around with figuring out its variables, and discovered that mass isn't one of them. Or well, not exactly. Since all matter is effectively tied to chakra the basic mass also has a chakra equivalent, but an object also being loaded up with a chakra charge has a much greater effect than if the object had a greater mass. So it's easier to switch with a log than a rock because wood has more chakra in it already, and if you loaded up some leaves with a huge chakra charge then you could probably switch with them too, even though doing so with an uncharged leaf would be impossible. On the other hand, this is also why switching with things that are too charged with chakra, people for most commonly, is so difficult. The sweat spot seems to be having just a bit more chakra than what you want to switch with.
One big limitation however is that the jutsu is pretty much line of sight only, and that doesn't include looking through the eyes of other puppets either. I need to be able to intuit the range between myself and the target, that's the aspect that seems to initialize the space-time aspect of the jutsu, grasping the physical dimensions of the swap. If I was trying to do it through the eyes of a puppet then then I'd need to know my location relative to the puppet relative to the target and then from there work out from there my exact position in respect to the target to make the jutsu work correctly.
Date: One month twenty seven days since awakening
Subject: Extra combat puppets
I don't have a lot of metal on hand, or at least none I could recycle, so I ended up harvesting a few logs to turn into human sized puppets. They're pretty much disposable, but they're more for ranged support with thrown weapons than direct conflict. I've been using them to practice a bit.
Naturally I have experience throwing weapons in both lives, puppet limbs make it easier to control the angle of a throw since there are less unconscious muscle movements to throw things off. Though I still need to take into account range, wind and gravity.
Having them fight each other is a bit like shadow-boxing, or maybe that's just some bullshit. What I mean is that I don't really improve a huge amount but I get a much better grasp of what I'm actually capable of.
I've read a bunch of stuff about how shadow clones could be used for training, too much really, a lot of it doesn't work. Things like looking over all my fights from multiple simultaneous angles for analysis, that's just confusing, as is trying to stitch together a bunch of perspectives to create a real time map of an ongoing scenario, makes my ephemeral brain hurt. Though the similarities with shadow clones aren't total, no independent creativity or mental issues like is seen in the show, so I can't have a thousand slightly different perspectives on the same technique to jump it forward all at once. Not that that I'm bothered, since I really doubt that it works as advertised anyway.
Date: Two months one day since awakening
Subject: It begins
I just heard. Yesterday Konoha launched an assault on Iwa forces in Ame, Iwa's countering with a full on advance on all borders, the other countries are responding in kind.
I've only got a few minutes before I need to get everything packed and ready to move, none of the old base locations are safe at this point.
I'm going to remind Sanji about my birds. At this point there's no reason to hold me back from spying as much as possible.
AN: Apparently the shunshin should only actually work for biological bodies, but I'm not doing that because it's way too basic. For maps, I'm using
as it makes the most sense to me.
Subject: Forced march
Chiyo is on command of the Brigade, but she split us up into three units, each going to a separate country. My group is under a chunin names Sanji.
Even with chakra reinforcement, if I didn't have my puppet body I would probably have a seriously hard time keeping the required pace. Some of the younger puppeteers have been lagging behind.
The biggest problem with desert travel has always been hauling water with you. Yet storage seals make that a complete non-issue. That means that the real issue is that the pace is just too brutal. Maybe they should get on their puppet's backs and have them carry them all the way, that seems like an efficient solution.
Date: One month after awakening
Subject: Front lines
I don't think the war has technically started just yet. It's more like border tension, just waiting for the official word to come down that conflict will begin and where. In the show they only really mentioned the fighting in Ame, and that would naturally be one of the main staging grounds due to it's central location between three main villages, but with the battle-royale nature of these wars, it's almost a given that River, Frost, and possibly Noodle and Tea countries will get into the same kind of situation.
The alliances in the show were all very tenuous, likely not even having existed for all that long. Taki was a long time ally of Konoha, but they tried to assassinate the Shodame, Kusa was palling around with Iwa, but they will probably be hit badly during this current war.
As a guess, I'd say that countries with minor shinobi villages will be preferred battle grounds to ones without, that way they can be knocked down a couple of pegs during the fight and won't get any ideas of usurping the position of one of the big five during the refractory period.
Without any clear notion of who is going to attack whom first, the villages have to guard all their borders about evenly. That's why I'm in Claw country at the moment, in case Iwa decides to come around from the western flank. They could come from even further west, through Fang country, but that area's so barren that it's only use is as a geographical convenience and as a trade route to Mountain and Bear countries, as well as lands further afield, via the river that comes down out of the northern ranges.
The landscape reminds me of those iconic mountains from China, sheer, poking up randomly from the landscape and covered with dense greenery. It's a sharp contract from the desert where I was before.
I'll need to see about finding some animals to imitate here, the variety is sure to be much higher due to the greater plant life. Might want to start my human-puppet experiments with animals so as to practice with simplified chakra networks.
Date: One month two days since awakening
Subject: Acclimation
I told Sanji about my capabilities, the Brigade words semi independently from the rest of the troops, so it'll be a while before I can set up a communications network using puppets. I don't see why they didn't have me just send a puppet with each group to start with, it would have been easier.
But then, for a group whose bread and butter ought to be intel they all seem to have only a mediocre grasp of the value of intelligence gathering and counter intelligence.
Even in basic strategy, knowing the positions and strength of the enemy is more important than having a strong force to take them on. Too much reliance on over-powered individuals in the history of the Elemental Nations I think.
Whatever. I've been sending out puppet-birds to scout the country on my own. I'm not quite willing to actively spy out Iwa's encampment though, that could be seen as an act of aggression, and initiative which just so happens to spark a war is doubtless enough to get me executed… or dismantled, I guess it would be.
Yesterday I set up my manufacturing body in my tent which will allow me to use my main and auxiliary bodies to do other things.
Rounded up a couple of squirrels for dissection. Is there any extra benefit to vivisection? Hmm, maybe, if I'm trying to replicate working chakra networks, or creating hyper-realistic bodies, other than that I don't really think so.
Date: One month seven days since awakening
Subject: Rodent puppets
I remember I once played a Squirrel deck for MTG, everything was fine until it went off and then *bam!* everyone got fucked. The image of an infinite hoard of squirrels blanketing the land like a nation of army-ants was always a peculiar mix of hilarious and terrifying.
Too bad these little guys can't do the same, like little fuzzy Replicators.
I have considered trying to build things like nano-machines, but the problem is that I don't think I could use the same form of remote control to manipulate them. The key limitation for puppetry are how small an object you can latch onto with a thread, while the main limitation for my variant is how small an object can be inscribed with seals. There simply wouldn't be enough surface area for anything smaller than an insect, and even then it'd be next to impossible to get the seals drawn on, though I do have a few ideas about that.
Oi, Shuzaku! Stop talking that gibberish, you're up on patrol next.
On my way.
Date: One month thirteen days after awakening
Subject: Research update
I have looked into the chakra networks of the animals I've been able to capture. The implications are a bit odd really. The network manifests at the sub-dermis, not deeper in. This explains why Sasori only had to flay his cadavers to harvest what he needed.
The reasons for this are a bit unclear. My hypothesis however is that it's due to the way that the soul and body overlap. Since things without a physical body still retain the shape and dimensions of their body, it stands to reason that the external dimensions of the soul roughly approximate that of the original body. This possibly explains both my own body's rejection and some of the problems Orochimaru had with his possession system, since the soul doesn't overlap properly and thus does not act complimentarily with the body, instead creating an antagonism.
Of course, without the soul to provide the yin and living body to provide the yang, the coils are pretty much dead and useless. What I discovered was that the coils react based on a mix of trained habit and innate traits, when chakra is flushed through the coils at a controlled rate they behave as though active and change it according to the nature and style of the original user. Of course, with just a few animals to test things on I didn't really have any shocking results, no ninja squirrels were harmed in the making of this report, but all animals have some access to charka, and those instinctual abilities often manifest in peculiar ways, limited though they are.
The other thing I spent time on was insects. Five days ago I set out netting to catch some insects. After collecting my harvest I suffocated them and attached threads to one of their corpses, could have left them alive but there was no point and it would have made things harder.
I used the insect I controlled with a thread to draw on the needed seals for the other dead insects. That worked well. There are some unforeseen problems with the overall plan however. Insects are slow for long distance travel, they get blown severely off course, and can't be safely maneuvered above the tree line or updrafts are liable to move them to ridiculous places. I had twenty eight to start with, now I'm down to sixteen.
It now makes sense to be why the Aburame use themselves as mobile carriers, and why the bee users from Iwa use summons exclusively rather than mixing in other variants. I might have to mix things up a little, like filling the torso of one of my birds with hornet puppets or something.
Of course these little guys will be invaluable for urban intelligence and espionage, since no one really pays attention to houseflies, but overall they don't seem as useful as Skitter made them out to be, probably because I have to personally create every insect I want to use and can't just casually grab a few thousand from the surroundings.
Maybe arachnids would be of more use, though they'd need some kind of web-shooting jutsu to make up for the fact that they were dead or made of inorganic materials.
I did look into the chakra networks of the insects as well. It seemed to support my hypothesis, given that they were attached to the chitin and not deeper within the ichor. If the overlap points weren't important then it'd make more sense for them to focus on areas that had more life, rather than the dead chitin layer.
Date: One month twenty days since awakening
Subject: Boredom
It's true what they say, 90% boredom and 10% of varying forms of terror and death. I haven't exactly run out of things to research, but I'm more and more limited by the lack of resources.
Complained to Sanji about not knowing the basic jutsu, he was generally pretty pissed that he got handed such a liability, and that I hadn't reported that fact earlier. So now I have to work on the henge, body flicker, kawarimi and bunshin. I already have a pretty good background experience on the henge and bunshin just from how I disguise my puppet's exteriors, but the two travel ones are a new experience for me.
The kawarimi is the obviously the simples space-time jutsu around, which makes it easy to get the basics of but incredibly difficult to really master, while the shunshin is an incredibly simplistic straight line acceleration spell that is easy to use but hard to apply due to how limited it was.
I'm not sure how important hand-seals actually are. I mean, I know that they originate from the Kuji-in Mudra, the hand signs for the nine-cuts of esoteric Buddhism. There they are used as, not quite mnemonics, closer to innate symbols that represent esoteric ideas.
Symbolism is important for most magical styles, so if chakra really is using it as a basis it would make sense that the hand-seals were aids to get the soul to form the jutsu correctly. Correlative, not causative.
Fun fact I worked out about the kawarimi. I was playing around with figuring out its variables, and discovered that mass isn't one of them. Or well, not exactly. Since all matter is effectively tied to chakra the basic mass also has a chakra equivalent, but an object also being loaded up with a chakra charge has a much greater effect than if the object had a greater mass. So it's easier to switch with a log than a rock because wood has more chakra in it already, and if you loaded up some leaves with a huge chakra charge then you could probably switch with them too, even though doing so with an uncharged leaf would be impossible. On the other hand, this is also why switching with things that are too charged with chakra, people for most commonly, is so difficult. The sweat spot seems to be having just a bit more chakra than what you want to switch with.
One big limitation however is that the jutsu is pretty much line of sight only, and that doesn't include looking through the eyes of other puppets either. I need to be able to intuit the range between myself and the target, that's the aspect that seems to initialize the space-time aspect of the jutsu, grasping the physical dimensions of the swap. If I was trying to do it through the eyes of a puppet then then I'd need to know my location relative to the puppet relative to the target and then from there work out from there my exact position in respect to the target to make the jutsu work correctly.
Date: One month twenty seven days since awakening
Subject: Extra combat puppets
I don't have a lot of metal on hand, or at least none I could recycle, so I ended up harvesting a few logs to turn into human sized puppets. They're pretty much disposable, but they're more for ranged support with thrown weapons than direct conflict. I've been using them to practice a bit.
Naturally I have experience throwing weapons in both lives, puppet limbs make it easier to control the angle of a throw since there are less unconscious muscle movements to throw things off. Though I still need to take into account range, wind and gravity.
Having them fight each other is a bit like shadow-boxing, or maybe that's just some bullshit. What I mean is that I don't really improve a huge amount but I get a much better grasp of what I'm actually capable of.
I've read a bunch of stuff about how shadow clones could be used for training, too much really, a lot of it doesn't work. Things like looking over all my fights from multiple simultaneous angles for analysis, that's just confusing, as is trying to stitch together a bunch of perspectives to create a real time map of an ongoing scenario, makes my ephemeral brain hurt. Though the similarities with shadow clones aren't total, no independent creativity or mental issues like is seen in the show, so I can't have a thousand slightly different perspectives on the same technique to jump it forward all at once. Not that that I'm bothered, since I really doubt that it works as advertised anyway.
Date: Two months one day since awakening
Subject: It begins
I just heard. Yesterday Konoha launched an assault on Iwa forces in Ame, Iwa's countering with a full on advance on all borders, the other countries are responding in kind.
I've only got a few minutes before I need to get everything packed and ready to move, none of the old base locations are safe at this point.
I'm going to remind Sanji about my birds. At this point there's no reason to hold me back from spying as much as possible.
AN: Apparently the shunshin should only actually work for biological bodies, but I'm not doing that because it's way too basic. For maps, I'm using
Serial Killer-ish
- Location
- US
Date: Two months four days since awakening
Subject: Update
We haven't been staying in any one spot for long, constantly moving from place to place in order to keep from having our camps discovered. Due to the desert terrain Suna traditionally practices more guerrilla tactics, not really liking major battles where dozens or even hundreds of troops can be lost in an instant.
I'm being made to do patrols alone, Sanji's decision. Officially I'm hot shit but to him I'm just the regular sort of shit. I guess the idea is that I'm hard to damage, wouldn't die even if my body happened to be destroyed and can instantly report back the locations of anyone I find, and won't get any of the other Suna nin killed.
I could blame him, but it makes sense, and in reality I don't much care for having random team mates looking over my shoulder on every action I make.
The hardest part so far has been the terrain issue. With the way that the mountains spring up so suddenly, and with rivers and dense forests everywhere else, it's a situation where every scouting area is terrible. When you have ninja that can climb mountains in minutes every peak can be a lookout post, water walking makes every river a road rather than a barrier. Anyone trying to look from on high can be seen from below, and anyone from below and be seen from above. There's really no ideal position, everything is a liability here.
My stance is to use birds in the sky, squirrels in the treetops and human shaped puppets on the ground. I figure that ground level will have the most underbrush and thus the most cover, though the tradeoff is naturally that it's also the most vulnerable to surprise attack.
Date: Three minutes out from targets
Subject: Iwa genin located
Birds spotted a group of three coming from the east, moving approx one third of full tree-hopping pace. They're about three minutes from my position. Look to be young, low teens, probably genin squad sent on low risk regional patrol. Scouting for backup teams and ambushes revealed nothing, will set up trap and capture or eliminate.
Date: Two months six days since awakening
Subject: After action report
I got some flash bang tags set up around the ambush point, they didn't have any effect on my puppet senses so it was fine.
When the Iwa team came through into the clearing I had several puppets disguised as deadfall. I attacked one of them immediately with senbon from one of the disposable puppets to the rear of their position. This caused them to stop and go on the alert, straining their senses enough so that when the first set of flash bangs went off they were more stunned than they otherwise would have been.
From their distracted position I launched an attack from my main body with my whip-dart towards the lower back of their bulkiest member. A paralyzing move so that if they wanted to retreat with him then they would need to result to total vulnerability in order to move him.
The non-linearity of the whip-dart seems to have done its job in disguising my original location, once they recovered from the initial assault and set up defenses postures around their paralyzed team mate they aimed most of their attacks towards the disposable puppet that first initiated combat. That one was pretty damaged by the attacks, might be trashed.
To disable the last two I began with a harrying attack with kunai from several directions while readying a massed attack from my birds and squirrels. The two puppet forms move in completely different ways and have different strengths, so I discovered that by waiting for the Iwa nin to predict the actions of a specific incoming puppet and then using kawarimi to switch it with one of the other puppets at the last moment it allowed for a significant increase in damage-per-second.
Not sure whether or not to report this to my superiors, might just say that they're dead and disposed of.
Date: A few hours after the battle
Subject: Research on shinobi
I decided to not report that I'm keeping these guys. They'll probably on be alive for a few days anyway, so it's not exactly a lie.
It's such a pity you can't seal living people into scrolls, odd too. I mean, you can seal yin chakra, yang charka, souls and bodies, each independently, but you can't seal a living person. It's not because of the process of sealing itself, since summoning uses very similar principles, so most likely it's due to the lack of air in whatever sealed environment is provided, possibly a lack of pressure as well. Might want to get something like scuba gear, hook it onto someone and try sealing them for a few minutes.
I dragged the team to a secluded spot far enough away from the battle to not be noticed or tracked. There are a couple of things I really need to know, how much of a difference is there between a shinobi's chakra network versus and animal's, and can I break into their minds using the yin seal I developed.
The second is important, since I can't do a lot of the construction and excavation work I need without Doton jutsu.
Right, so symbol for yin, lines to represent the cage and script surrounding it to block off further interference… aaaannd there. First test subject is ready.
My idea is that the Yamanaka need their special jutsu to project their minds and initialize the access, this seal does both for me, the rest of their jutsu are for dealing with the ego once they get in. For that I have the parallel processing of dozens of bodies ready to attack en-mass. What I wouldn't give for some narcotics right about now, a few drops of some hallucinogenic and I doubt that he would be able to put up even the slightest amount of resistance.
I'm going in.
Date: Two months seven days after awakening
Subject: Research results
I dived into all three, not sure how useful it really was just yet. Most of what they knew was just academy bullshit, not even close to useful to me, a lot of the rest was propaganda or daily life. One of them wasn't even earth natured, but rather fire, and none of them had practiced any real nature transformation. Disappointing.
The only new jutsu I got out of it was the Hiding like a Mole technique, C ranked and fairly standard for Iwa shinobi to know before being allowed into the field. It wasn't really what I wanted, but I'll take it. I'll have to get a couple of puppets to work on Doton transformation, the idea of crumbing earth shouldn't be all that hard to figure out.
For their chakra networks, from what I can tell the seem to essentially hold a record of all the jutsu each shinobi is capable of, hence why the hunter-nin incinerate bodies on finding them and why most jounin will go out with a destructive suicide jutsu if they know they don't have a chance. So really, the only major difference between getting the information from their bodies and getting it from their minds is that by delving into their minds I can keep their coils intact for other uses.
I did have to psyche myself up to killing them though. I think that fact that no one would care if I did, and that I would actually be blamed if I didn't, caused a lot of changes in priorities. I would hesitate to call it social pressure, since I never really spent all that much time around the people of Suna, and I don't have much comradery with the other shinobi stationed out here.
I think I probably had an easier time of it since I didn't try to kill them during battle. I know that people say it's easier during a fight than killing a defenseless man, but it's hard to intentionally aim for a lethal blow with melee or thrown weapons. I found it much simpler to just open up a tiny bit of an artery and let time do the rest, it's psychologically a lot simpler than the whole slashed neck routine.
Anyway. I took their skins and hearts… man, I sound like a serial killer just saying that. No, it doesn't put the lotion on its skin, it uses a solution to tan the hides so that they don't decay. I don't have any idea how Sasori got his heart to keep producing yang chakra, but I'll probably be doing experiments on it in the future. I did consider possibly hooking these three shinobi up as living chakra batteries, the problem though is that yang is vitality, and without constant physical activity their yang levels would decrease till they approached those of coma patients, completely atrophied and useless.
Besides which, a sudden strong spike in yang chakra would utterly ruin my chakra control. That's just not worth it.
Date: Two months nine days since awakening
Subject: Returned to camp
Oi, finally returned from your route?
Yeah. Ran into a team of Iwa genin, had to make sure I couldn't be tracked from dumping their bodies.
Oh?! Anything to report about that?
Not really. I didn't get a chance to interrogate them, they had pretty decent teamwork and stuck to one defensive zone, I couldn't get a chance to capture them one by one, and even if I had, bringing them back all this way just to interrogate a couple of small fries like that would have been more trouble than it was worth.
That's not your choice to make, genin.
You put me out in the field without any supervision, that gives me operational autonomy in my book. It was my call to make and I didn't have much latitude as it was.
Tch.
When am I going to be allowed to set up a communications network with the other camps?
Talk to commander Akari about it, she's the one you have to impress. As it is you don't have clearance to know the exact locations of the other camps, nor the capability to keep that information secure from enemies.
As if. I can't be tortured, I can't be cornered by an interrogation jutsu, there's no one better able to keep military secrets than me.
Like I said, tell it to Akari, it's not my call.
*rustle*
*footsteps*
Yeah, so there's that. Now I have to convince the camp commander, except I seriously doubt she has enough authority to know the locations of the other camps herself. I think she's just a lower level jounin, this flank is far enough out of the way that it doesn't really warrant any real powerhouses.
I'll need to get an endorsement sent through her to Suna proper so that it can be approved by probably either the Kazekage or Chiyo. That's not going to be easy, getting enough proof of capability to create that kind of endorsement. I think I might need to start engaging in the traditional samurai hobby of head-hunting. If I bring in a valuable enough prisoner, or the head of one, then that should be able to act as my resume for the powers that be, proof that I can be trusted to be able to protect any secrets I'm given.
Subject: Update
We haven't been staying in any one spot for long, constantly moving from place to place in order to keep from having our camps discovered. Due to the desert terrain Suna traditionally practices more guerrilla tactics, not really liking major battles where dozens or even hundreds of troops can be lost in an instant.
I'm being made to do patrols alone, Sanji's decision. Officially I'm hot shit but to him I'm just the regular sort of shit. I guess the idea is that I'm hard to damage, wouldn't die even if my body happened to be destroyed and can instantly report back the locations of anyone I find, and won't get any of the other Suna nin killed.
I could blame him, but it makes sense, and in reality I don't much care for having random team mates looking over my shoulder on every action I make.
The hardest part so far has been the terrain issue. With the way that the mountains spring up so suddenly, and with rivers and dense forests everywhere else, it's a situation where every scouting area is terrible. When you have ninja that can climb mountains in minutes every peak can be a lookout post, water walking makes every river a road rather than a barrier. Anyone trying to look from on high can be seen from below, and anyone from below and be seen from above. There's really no ideal position, everything is a liability here.
My stance is to use birds in the sky, squirrels in the treetops and human shaped puppets on the ground. I figure that ground level will have the most underbrush and thus the most cover, though the tradeoff is naturally that it's also the most vulnerable to surprise attack.
Date: Three minutes out from targets
Subject: Iwa genin located
Birds spotted a group of three coming from the east, moving approx one third of full tree-hopping pace. They're about three minutes from my position. Look to be young, low teens, probably genin squad sent on low risk regional patrol. Scouting for backup teams and ambushes revealed nothing, will set up trap and capture or eliminate.
Date: Two months six days since awakening
Subject: After action report
I got some flash bang tags set up around the ambush point, they didn't have any effect on my puppet senses so it was fine.
When the Iwa team came through into the clearing I had several puppets disguised as deadfall. I attacked one of them immediately with senbon from one of the disposable puppets to the rear of their position. This caused them to stop and go on the alert, straining their senses enough so that when the first set of flash bangs went off they were more stunned than they otherwise would have been.
From their distracted position I launched an attack from my main body with my whip-dart towards the lower back of their bulkiest member. A paralyzing move so that if they wanted to retreat with him then they would need to result to total vulnerability in order to move him.
The non-linearity of the whip-dart seems to have done its job in disguising my original location, once they recovered from the initial assault and set up defenses postures around their paralyzed team mate they aimed most of their attacks towards the disposable puppet that first initiated combat. That one was pretty damaged by the attacks, might be trashed.
To disable the last two I began with a harrying attack with kunai from several directions while readying a massed attack from my birds and squirrels. The two puppet forms move in completely different ways and have different strengths, so I discovered that by waiting for the Iwa nin to predict the actions of a specific incoming puppet and then using kawarimi to switch it with one of the other puppets at the last moment it allowed for a significant increase in damage-per-second.
Not sure whether or not to report this to my superiors, might just say that they're dead and disposed of.
Date: A few hours after the battle
Subject: Research on shinobi
I decided to not report that I'm keeping these guys. They'll probably on be alive for a few days anyway, so it's not exactly a lie.
It's such a pity you can't seal living people into scrolls, odd too. I mean, you can seal yin chakra, yang charka, souls and bodies, each independently, but you can't seal a living person. It's not because of the process of sealing itself, since summoning uses very similar principles, so most likely it's due to the lack of air in whatever sealed environment is provided, possibly a lack of pressure as well. Might want to get something like scuba gear, hook it onto someone and try sealing them for a few minutes.
I dragged the team to a secluded spot far enough away from the battle to not be noticed or tracked. There are a couple of things I really need to know, how much of a difference is there between a shinobi's chakra network versus and animal's, and can I break into their minds using the yin seal I developed.
The second is important, since I can't do a lot of the construction and excavation work I need without Doton jutsu.
Right, so symbol for yin, lines to represent the cage and script surrounding it to block off further interference… aaaannd there. First test subject is ready.
My idea is that the Yamanaka need their special jutsu to project their minds and initialize the access, this seal does both for me, the rest of their jutsu are for dealing with the ego once they get in. For that I have the parallel processing of dozens of bodies ready to attack en-mass. What I wouldn't give for some narcotics right about now, a few drops of some hallucinogenic and I doubt that he would be able to put up even the slightest amount of resistance.
I'm going in.
Date: Two months seven days after awakening
Subject: Research results
I dived into all three, not sure how useful it really was just yet. Most of what they knew was just academy bullshit, not even close to useful to me, a lot of the rest was propaganda or daily life. One of them wasn't even earth natured, but rather fire, and none of them had practiced any real nature transformation. Disappointing.
The only new jutsu I got out of it was the Hiding like a Mole technique, C ranked and fairly standard for Iwa shinobi to know before being allowed into the field. It wasn't really what I wanted, but I'll take it. I'll have to get a couple of puppets to work on Doton transformation, the idea of crumbing earth shouldn't be all that hard to figure out.
For their chakra networks, from what I can tell the seem to essentially hold a record of all the jutsu each shinobi is capable of, hence why the hunter-nin incinerate bodies on finding them and why most jounin will go out with a destructive suicide jutsu if they know they don't have a chance. So really, the only major difference between getting the information from their bodies and getting it from their minds is that by delving into their minds I can keep their coils intact for other uses.
I did have to psyche myself up to killing them though. I think that fact that no one would care if I did, and that I would actually be blamed if I didn't, caused a lot of changes in priorities. I would hesitate to call it social pressure, since I never really spent all that much time around the people of Suna, and I don't have much comradery with the other shinobi stationed out here.
I think I probably had an easier time of it since I didn't try to kill them during battle. I know that people say it's easier during a fight than killing a defenseless man, but it's hard to intentionally aim for a lethal blow with melee or thrown weapons. I found it much simpler to just open up a tiny bit of an artery and let time do the rest, it's psychologically a lot simpler than the whole slashed neck routine.
Anyway. I took their skins and hearts… man, I sound like a serial killer just saying that. No, it doesn't put the lotion on its skin, it uses a solution to tan the hides so that they don't decay. I don't have any idea how Sasori got his heart to keep producing yang chakra, but I'll probably be doing experiments on it in the future. I did consider possibly hooking these three shinobi up as living chakra batteries, the problem though is that yang is vitality, and without constant physical activity their yang levels would decrease till they approached those of coma patients, completely atrophied and useless.
Besides which, a sudden strong spike in yang chakra would utterly ruin my chakra control. That's just not worth it.
Date: Two months nine days since awakening
Subject: Returned to camp
Oi, finally returned from your route?
Yeah. Ran into a team of Iwa genin, had to make sure I couldn't be tracked from dumping their bodies.
Oh?! Anything to report about that?
Not really. I didn't get a chance to interrogate them, they had pretty decent teamwork and stuck to one defensive zone, I couldn't get a chance to capture them one by one, and even if I had, bringing them back all this way just to interrogate a couple of small fries like that would have been more trouble than it was worth.
That's not your choice to make, genin.
You put me out in the field without any supervision, that gives me operational autonomy in my book. It was my call to make and I didn't have much latitude as it was.
Tch.
When am I going to be allowed to set up a communications network with the other camps?
Talk to commander Akari about it, she's the one you have to impress. As it is you don't have clearance to know the exact locations of the other camps, nor the capability to keep that information secure from enemies.
As if. I can't be tortured, I can't be cornered by an interrogation jutsu, there's no one better able to keep military secrets than me.
Like I said, tell it to Akari, it's not my call.
*rustle*
*footsteps*
Yeah, so there's that. Now I have to convince the camp commander, except I seriously doubt she has enough authority to know the locations of the other camps herself. I think she's just a lower level jounin, this flank is far enough out of the way that it doesn't really warrant any real powerhouses.
I'll need to get an endorsement sent through her to Suna proper so that it can be approved by probably either the Kazekage or Chiyo. That's not going to be easy, getting enough proof of capability to create that kind of endorsement. I think I might need to start engaging in the traditional samurai hobby of head-hunting. If I bring in a valuable enough prisoner, or the head of one, then that should be able to act as my resume for the powers that be, proof that I can be trusted to be able to protect any secrets I'm given.
Making of a name
- Location
- US
Date: Two months thirteen days since awakening
Subject: Preparations
I managed to borrow a bingo book to try to find targets and weaknesses. Now that I actually say that out lout, the name is really stupid. It makes me think of like an instruction manual for playing a really bloody version of bingo, where the bounty hunters have to get the right kills to fill out their sheet, fortunately the center square is free so that makes it easier on everyone.
Unfortunately I won't have any real idea of who is actually at the Iwa camp until I scout out the area a bit.
Repairing the puppet from the fight wasn't easy. The kunai really did a number on it, several of the internal cables are severed, and the splintering has clogged up the ball joints. I can probably salvage the main pieces, sand them down a bit, but the spheres will have to be re-carved from scratch.
Date: Two months fifteen days since awakening
Subject: searching for Iwa encampment
I've been doing a zigzag search pattern with my birds, high altitude, south to north, west to east, starting at the least likely zones and moving closer and closer towards Earth country.
No luck so far, nor any patrols spotted.
Date: Two months seventeen days since awakening
Subject search results
No camps, two enemy patrols, unable to tail them for long before arousing suspicion. Trails seem to indicate that their base is to the north-east of the country's capital.
Date: Two months nineteen days since awakening
Subject: search results
Number of patrols increases dramatically when looking closer towards Claw's capital.
Date: Two months twenty days since awakening
Subject: Iwa base camp
Found it! Half way sunk into the ground at the back of a blind canyon. I assume that there's probably an escape route planned out, though in reality an escape route with ninja could easily be straight up a sheer cliff face.
Date: Two months twenty six days since awakening
Subject: Infiltration
It took a few days to fly a bird back, I loaded it up with a dozen of my left over insect puppets and fly it back. It's a lot of work just to ferry such a tiny payload. The birds are actually quite slow, about the pace of a real bird, so as to avoid suspicion. If I were going full tilt I could reach the Iwa base in a day, maybe less.
Bird is swooping low now. I've released the passengers…
Seems I was at least partially correct. The area that's visible from the air is all barracks, people moving in and out frequently, yet there are no command tends, no hospital tents, no armories or storage areas. All the logistics are elsewhere, this is just a clearing area for field teams.
I recognize that guy, Naboru Isumi, high ranked chunin with a specialization in rock traps. Pit falls, rockslides, surprise boulders, his record has it all.
Oh, and that looks like Masaka Hitomi, genjutsu mistress.
There are some dangerous people around here. Or, at least they're dangerous for me.
There are enough insects buzzing around the lights… I think I can get a few of my own to intermingle with them unnoticed.
It's odd, I had thought that there would be an underground passage for sure, something like Otogakure, but I'm not seeing any. If this is really all there is here, then they must be pulling out, just leaving a few of their stronger people to hold their rear.
Aaaannd gotch'ya. I infiltrated a single insect into some fabric folds of some of the stronger people. Even if they find them they're just seem like dead bugs that got squished between layers. Alight, it'd be a bit embarrassing if one of them sensed the chakra in the supposedly dead insect, but the amount of chakra flowing into them is really comparable to a living insect, so it should be fine.
Date: Two months twenty seven days since awakening
Subject: I'm an idiot
The bugs I left on the chunin revealed that there is indeed an entrance. A bunch of rock nin hiding their door behind a rock, what a shocker! I can't believe I didn't think of that.
They seem to open up every morning and evening to switch out personnel and supplies. I'm sure that there are a few backdoors to the complex, but they're also doubtless hidden at least as well as this one.
When the next opening comes I'm sending in a couple of scouting bugs to check it out.
Date: Twelve hours later
Subject: Chance
Slipped in three bugs, last one almost didn't make it, getting clipped on the tail. If it were alive it would probably be leaking ichor and internal organs right now.
The design doesn't seem to be like Orochimaru's bases, maybe the twisty pattern in the stone was a personal conceit, meant to represent writhing snakes, it's make sense with the dark purple stone and poor lighting, possibly as a camouflage for any actual snakes he left lying around.
This base is well lit with plain brown stone. Homogeneous enough with the surrounding rock that even if you carved your way in from the outside you probably wouldn't notice the difference in texture or appearance.
Simple layout, I'd expect it to be convoluted. Maybe it's because it has a lot of people coming and going, or maybe because it's temporary, I haven't quite figured that out yet.
First level seems to be the hospital, makes sense, don't want to be going up and down stairs with the dying. Grid pattern to the hallways, emergency escape route… seems to be over to the north, that'd put its exit near the river. Ok, in that case they'd probably just float back to Earth country and safety, smart.
Second level is storage and logistics it looks like. Huh, the armory is kind of bare. I would have thought that can manipulate rock would easily have the strongest manufacturing economy, yet for some reason they don't seem to have major applications in the mining industry.
Third level, here we go, administration and command. Shit, the commander is Tetsuo Ogata, mid ranked jounin. If Akemi is similar to Ebisu from the show, then Ogata is closer to Hayate Gekko. Even if we did attack this base full on, with the most favorable odds possible, they'd still slaughter us.
Taking out the commander simply wasn't going to happen. I seriously doubt I would be able to even make a dent in the guys outside, and if they got attacked then the automatic response would be for the people in the underground base to scatter… Huh. I think I have a plan, tis a cunning plan indeed, but I'll need to test a few things first.
Date: Two months twenty nine days after awakening
Subject: Sealed space
I was correct. I put one of my yang source squirrels in an airtight container and sealed it. He came back fine.
Between making the human sized containers, I'll just call them caskets, and churning out enough disposable puppets, it's going to be a busy few days.
Date: Three months eight days since awakening
Subject: Preparations complete
I made sure to complete sixty caskets, a third again as many I should need in even the best of circumstances, and managed to get twenty six disposable puppets ready in time. I've got them sealed in some scrolls stuffed in the bellies of some of my birds. It should hopefully work as planned.
Date: Three months ten days since awakening
Subject: After action report
I started off by having twenty puppets disguised as Suna nin approach the surface encampment. Five were sent under the dirt to begin the surprise assault.
Something that is never really used, but which I have no intention of overlooking, is mixing together subterranean movement jutsu with explosives. It's not quite as effective as a monodirectional bomb, anti-personnel mine or claymore, but it still does the job. I tried to select gravel heavy zones just in case.
When the explosive tags went off all hell broke loose. The chunin ordered up their teams, the green genin started pissing themselves, it was utter chaos for about ten seconds. That was how long it took for the puppets to get into combat range, and for the Iwa nin to start reacting according to engrained habit.
The five I had underground previously came up in their flank, but Naboru Isumi matched them far too easily. That was a straight up slaughter, I couldn't do a thing to him. What the move did accomplish however was that he was distracted for a few minutes while the other puppets harassed the main body of the enemy.
I didn't need to win, I just needed to scare them and make them eat up time.
While that was all going on, the evacuations of the command area were happening to the south, while the wounded were being ferried out the north. The commanders would probably circle around and attack my rear, but that didn't matter to me.
Since I already know roughly where to look, it wasn't that hard to predict the ideal location for the hospital to evacuate from. That's where the other six puppets came in.
Iwa's medics weren't shinobi, they were academy dropouts, conscientious objectors, people with too much control but too little power to ever be useful in combat. The dangerous ones were the wounded, one or two of them might actually be a bit of a problem, but I planned ahead for that as well, having used my days of advance opportunity to soak my insect puppets in sedatives from the very hospital they were evacuating. A couple of preemptive bug bites and they were too zonked to be able to react, though it wasn't actually enough to fully incapacitate them.
There's no Ninja Redcross, no inter-village warcrimes commission, no ban on attacking medical convoys. If anyone proposed that sort of stuff to the shinobi they'd probably either laugh in their face or just be incredibly confused.
The only thing that really mattered was that the people coming out of the door were valuable targets, people far too strong for me normally, but currently weakened. So I grabbed them.
Twenty eight shinobi and fifteen medics. All sealed away in caskets and placed in scrolls. No chance of escape. The highest ranked one is probably a higher level chunin. He might not be a commander, but the intelligence he can provide will be invaluable.
… I wish I could take some of these guys apart, they're skills might be useful, but no, they were bargaining chips. Nothing really important enough to go for their bodies anyway, I only prioritized to two I took before so I could do research on making human puppets, trying with something more complicated this early out the gate would probably be a mess.
Date: Three months twelve days after awakening
Subject: Results
Tis better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Probably helps that I brought in a few dozen enemy captives on my own. I'm still being punished though.
Having to work logistical support for a while isn't a bad bargain, not for getting what I wanted. I have acknowledgement, I have my name on a report heading for the Kazekage's own desk that shows I can handle myself. I even made sure that note was made of my communications capabilities and suggestions, just in case.
All according to plan. Mwahahaha.
Subject: Preparations
I managed to borrow a bingo book to try to find targets and weaknesses. Now that I actually say that out lout, the name is really stupid. It makes me think of like an instruction manual for playing a really bloody version of bingo, where the bounty hunters have to get the right kills to fill out their sheet, fortunately the center square is free so that makes it easier on everyone.
Unfortunately I won't have any real idea of who is actually at the Iwa camp until I scout out the area a bit.
Repairing the puppet from the fight wasn't easy. The kunai really did a number on it, several of the internal cables are severed, and the splintering has clogged up the ball joints. I can probably salvage the main pieces, sand them down a bit, but the spheres will have to be re-carved from scratch.
Date: Two months fifteen days since awakening
Subject: searching for Iwa encampment
I've been doing a zigzag search pattern with my birds, high altitude, south to north, west to east, starting at the least likely zones and moving closer and closer towards Earth country.
No luck so far, nor any patrols spotted.
Date: Two months seventeen days since awakening
Subject search results
No camps, two enemy patrols, unable to tail them for long before arousing suspicion. Trails seem to indicate that their base is to the north-east of the country's capital.
Date: Two months nineteen days since awakening
Subject: search results
Number of patrols increases dramatically when looking closer towards Claw's capital.
Date: Two months twenty days since awakening
Subject: Iwa base camp
Found it! Half way sunk into the ground at the back of a blind canyon. I assume that there's probably an escape route planned out, though in reality an escape route with ninja could easily be straight up a sheer cliff face.
Date: Two months twenty six days since awakening
Subject: Infiltration
It took a few days to fly a bird back, I loaded it up with a dozen of my left over insect puppets and fly it back. It's a lot of work just to ferry such a tiny payload. The birds are actually quite slow, about the pace of a real bird, so as to avoid suspicion. If I were going full tilt I could reach the Iwa base in a day, maybe less.
Bird is swooping low now. I've released the passengers…
Seems I was at least partially correct. The area that's visible from the air is all barracks, people moving in and out frequently, yet there are no command tends, no hospital tents, no armories or storage areas. All the logistics are elsewhere, this is just a clearing area for field teams.
I recognize that guy, Naboru Isumi, high ranked chunin with a specialization in rock traps. Pit falls, rockslides, surprise boulders, his record has it all.
Oh, and that looks like Masaka Hitomi, genjutsu mistress.
There are some dangerous people around here. Or, at least they're dangerous for me.
There are enough insects buzzing around the lights… I think I can get a few of my own to intermingle with them unnoticed.
It's odd, I had thought that there would be an underground passage for sure, something like Otogakure, but I'm not seeing any. If this is really all there is here, then they must be pulling out, just leaving a few of their stronger people to hold their rear.
Aaaannd gotch'ya. I infiltrated a single insect into some fabric folds of some of the stronger people. Even if they find them they're just seem like dead bugs that got squished between layers. Alight, it'd be a bit embarrassing if one of them sensed the chakra in the supposedly dead insect, but the amount of chakra flowing into them is really comparable to a living insect, so it should be fine.
Date: Two months twenty seven days since awakening
Subject: I'm an idiot
The bugs I left on the chunin revealed that there is indeed an entrance. A bunch of rock nin hiding their door behind a rock, what a shocker! I can't believe I didn't think of that.
They seem to open up every morning and evening to switch out personnel and supplies. I'm sure that there are a few backdoors to the complex, but they're also doubtless hidden at least as well as this one.
When the next opening comes I'm sending in a couple of scouting bugs to check it out.
Date: Twelve hours later
Subject: Chance
Slipped in three bugs, last one almost didn't make it, getting clipped on the tail. If it were alive it would probably be leaking ichor and internal organs right now.
The design doesn't seem to be like Orochimaru's bases, maybe the twisty pattern in the stone was a personal conceit, meant to represent writhing snakes, it's make sense with the dark purple stone and poor lighting, possibly as a camouflage for any actual snakes he left lying around.
This base is well lit with plain brown stone. Homogeneous enough with the surrounding rock that even if you carved your way in from the outside you probably wouldn't notice the difference in texture or appearance.
Simple layout, I'd expect it to be convoluted. Maybe it's because it has a lot of people coming and going, or maybe because it's temporary, I haven't quite figured that out yet.
First level seems to be the hospital, makes sense, don't want to be going up and down stairs with the dying. Grid pattern to the hallways, emergency escape route… seems to be over to the north, that'd put its exit near the river. Ok, in that case they'd probably just float back to Earth country and safety, smart.
Second level is storage and logistics it looks like. Huh, the armory is kind of bare. I would have thought that can manipulate rock would easily have the strongest manufacturing economy, yet for some reason they don't seem to have major applications in the mining industry.
Third level, here we go, administration and command. Shit, the commander is Tetsuo Ogata, mid ranked jounin. If Akemi is similar to Ebisu from the show, then Ogata is closer to Hayate Gekko. Even if we did attack this base full on, with the most favorable odds possible, they'd still slaughter us.
Taking out the commander simply wasn't going to happen. I seriously doubt I would be able to even make a dent in the guys outside, and if they got attacked then the automatic response would be for the people in the underground base to scatter… Huh. I think I have a plan, tis a cunning plan indeed, but I'll need to test a few things first.
Date: Two months twenty nine days after awakening
Subject: Sealed space
I was correct. I put one of my yang source squirrels in an airtight container and sealed it. He came back fine.
Between making the human sized containers, I'll just call them caskets, and churning out enough disposable puppets, it's going to be a busy few days.
Date: Three months eight days since awakening
Subject: Preparations complete
I made sure to complete sixty caskets, a third again as many I should need in even the best of circumstances, and managed to get twenty six disposable puppets ready in time. I've got them sealed in some scrolls stuffed in the bellies of some of my birds. It should hopefully work as planned.
Date: Three months ten days since awakening
Subject: After action report
I started off by having twenty puppets disguised as Suna nin approach the surface encampment. Five were sent under the dirt to begin the surprise assault.
Something that is never really used, but which I have no intention of overlooking, is mixing together subterranean movement jutsu with explosives. It's not quite as effective as a monodirectional bomb, anti-personnel mine or claymore, but it still does the job. I tried to select gravel heavy zones just in case.
When the explosive tags went off all hell broke loose. The chunin ordered up their teams, the green genin started pissing themselves, it was utter chaos for about ten seconds. That was how long it took for the puppets to get into combat range, and for the Iwa nin to start reacting according to engrained habit.
The five I had underground previously came up in their flank, but Naboru Isumi matched them far too easily. That was a straight up slaughter, I couldn't do a thing to him. What the move did accomplish however was that he was distracted for a few minutes while the other puppets harassed the main body of the enemy.
I didn't need to win, I just needed to scare them and make them eat up time.
While that was all going on, the evacuations of the command area were happening to the south, while the wounded were being ferried out the north. The commanders would probably circle around and attack my rear, but that didn't matter to me.
Since I already know roughly where to look, it wasn't that hard to predict the ideal location for the hospital to evacuate from. That's where the other six puppets came in.
Iwa's medics weren't shinobi, they were academy dropouts, conscientious objectors, people with too much control but too little power to ever be useful in combat. The dangerous ones were the wounded, one or two of them might actually be a bit of a problem, but I planned ahead for that as well, having used my days of advance opportunity to soak my insect puppets in sedatives from the very hospital they were evacuating. A couple of preemptive bug bites and they were too zonked to be able to react, though it wasn't actually enough to fully incapacitate them.
There's no Ninja Redcross, no inter-village warcrimes commission, no ban on attacking medical convoys. If anyone proposed that sort of stuff to the shinobi they'd probably either laugh in their face or just be incredibly confused.
The only thing that really mattered was that the people coming out of the door were valuable targets, people far too strong for me normally, but currently weakened. So I grabbed them.
Twenty eight shinobi and fifteen medics. All sealed away in caskets and placed in scrolls. No chance of escape. The highest ranked one is probably a higher level chunin. He might not be a commander, but the intelligence he can provide will be invaluable.
… I wish I could take some of these guys apart, they're skills might be useful, but no, they were bargaining chips. Nothing really important enough to go for their bodies anyway, I only prioritized to two I took before so I could do research on making human puppets, trying with something more complicated this early out the gate would probably be a mess.
Date: Three months twelve days after awakening
Subject: Results
Tis better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Probably helps that I brought in a few dozen enemy captives on my own. I'm still being punished though.
Having to work logistical support for a while isn't a bad bargain, not for getting what I wanted. I have acknowledgement, I have my name on a report heading for the Kazekage's own desk that shows I can handle myself. I even made sure that note was made of my communications capabilities and suggestions, just in case.
All according to plan. Mwahahaha.
Different country; different shit actually
- Location
- US
Date: Three months nineteen days after awakening
Subject: News
I heard that the Iwa teams got pulled back, they'll probably be split up and set to Ame and Kusa. Iwa has it so easy, they have so few borders to guard.
I guess that means that our camp will be scheduled for dismantling as well. It was just here to make sure that Iwa didn't invade, so it'll probably stick around for a few weeks to make sure that the enemy retreat isn't a trick before being taken apart as well.
Akemi decided that if I have so many bodies then there would be no problem in having me take over the whole rations distribution system. It's really just a ploy to make sure I can't keep myself entertained with other bodies.
Date: Three months twenty six days after awakening
Subject: Bored
So bored. What happened to the 10% pants shitting terror I was promised from this war? I want my money back.
Date: Three months thirty days after awakening
Subject: Uuugh
Terry Pratchett once said that humans could fetishize anything except boredom. Ninjas apparently have realized that too.
Fuck them. Fuck them all to hell!
I even tried meditation, that's fucking bored I am. Didn't work. Probably no brainwaves, heartbeat or biological body, so the physiological changes that in turn cause the psychological benefits, which in turn cause physiological benefits, all couldn't happen.
Date: Four months four days after awakening
Subject: Yes!
We're blowing this popsicle stand!
So long Sanji, so long Akemi, you horrid bastards.
Still have to trek back to Suna before being redeployed though.
Date: Four months six days after awakening
Subject: Suna
God I missed this place. Must have spent too much time here as a child, because when I look at the terrain and the buildings all I can think is that it looks like home.
Really screwy.
Genin Shuzaku, you are wanted in the Kazakage's office. Come with us.
Huh? Yes sir.
*fwoofwoofwoosh*
Do you have to use sand for you shunin? You're getting it everywhere.
Kazekage-sama, we've brought him
Good.
So Shuzaku, I've heard you did as well as can be expected out in the field.
Nobody seemed to want to put me to the test so I took a chance to do what I was recruited to do.
Why didn't you report the location of the enemy camp first?
It wouldn't have mattered. None of the people at our camp could have done anything against them, any assault would have been a suicide mission, and they would just changed base locations afterwards. Since I'm the best choice for suicide missions by far, it seemed reasonable to cut out the middle-men and make the mission something achievable.
Hm, logical. Still, I'm going to be putting you under someone that can give better oversight. No more gallivanting off without orders.
Yes sir.
…Now, think critically about the attack. What could you have done to have a higher success rate?
Well, the only thing I can think of is that if I had better puppets, ones designed for close combat or to imitate jutsu, then the damage done to surface encampment would have been much greater.
I thought all the puppeteers had access to those.
Maybe, but I never studied under a puppeteer, so all my puppets have about the same capabilities as fresh genin, though considerably faster and stronger.
I can see how that would be a problem… Not much that can be done about it though! Try to work out how to do what you need as much as you can, take some resources from the Brigade barracks, or buy them with your bounty money. When the war is over we can focus more on getting you up to par.
Right sir. So, where am I being deployed?
Sea country.
That'd be contested territory with Konoha and Kiri right?
Correct. So your talents will be put to good use. They're trying to disrupt our shipping lanes over there. They can't be allowed to succeed or the war will become much harder.
Understood. Have you read about my proposal to have small puppets at all the bases to allow for instant communications?
I have. I can't in good conscience allow you to know the locations of all the bases. However, what we'll do is box up the puppets. That way they won't be able to see where they're going and you won't know the exact locations.
You do realize that I'll still hear anything that's communicated through the network right?
That'll just be reports. All the sensitive orders will still happen by courier.
Yes sir.
Date: Four months seven days after awakening
Subject: Preparations
I've got three days till I have to head to Sea country. I'm not sure how my puppets will do with the water, might have to get some kind of wood varnish or wax to protect them.
It's surprising that Suna nin do well with water at all. But then, they're a bit like Arab traders from the middle ages, they need to trade so badly that they end up going much further afield that any of the other groups.
Though they still rely on ships, not like the Kiri nin that just swim or water walk everywhere. It really wouldn't surprise me if water walking was part of the reason why the explored world is so small. The distance that a shinobi's chakra will last while water waling is much shorter than the distance that an ocean going ship can travel with the winds.
None of the Daimyo are going to trust traders to explore for them, they're using a Confucianist mercantile system where merchants are scum. Which honestly kind of explains Gato, poor guy. And none of the shinobi villages want to engage in exploration when they have enough enemies right where they are. The idea of going off and finding allies is laughable.
Seems kind of contradictory at first, having merchants be reviled but Wind country rely so heavily on trade. Thing is, the traders out of Wind country aren't legally merchants, but rather lower leveled nobles and second sons trying to build up their personal wealth before feeding it into the economy. That's a totally different thing, in the Confucian system.
Date: Four months nine days after awakening
Subject: Aquatic puppets
I've been working on puppets in the shape of cephalopods. My thinking is that tentacles are easier to mimic than fish. Though I've been filling the internals with sand so that they won't float. Floating sea-puppets would be such an embarrassment.
Haven't quite settled on a style to them yet. It will probably depend on what sorts of creatures live around Sea. There's no chance that the area is devoid of cephalopods, the Elemental Nations are a ripoff of Japan, it has them.
Date: Four months twelve days after awakening
Subject: I'm on a boat!
I can't get that song out of my head.
Had to go down to the capital of Wind and catch a boat to Jiro Island.
Nicest thing about being a puppet so far, can't get sea sick since I have no stomach.
Date: Four months twenty days after awakening
Subject: Sea country
Boats are really slow, much slower than foot travel. Still, we finally got there. I spent a lot of the time focusing of other bodies. Some of the disposable puppets I left in Claw, they've started moving more towards the west, so they can wrap around and find a way to Hidden Star village. A few of the communications puppets have been shipped off towards their destinations. I recognize a bit of Ame around one of them, and I think another might be in River country.
You must be Shuzaku, it's a pleasure to meet you. My name's Kaga, I'll be umm, your superior? Your supervisor I guess is more like it. You're the only puppeteer here so all I can really do is sign off on what you need and try to work you into any operations the rest of us have planned.
Thank you for meeting me. I hope we get along well, I'll try to stay out of your way and not make too much trouble.
No, no, don't worry about it. I read the file on you, parts of it are too classified for me but I get the impression that you're supposed to be some kind of terror weapon. Is that right?
More or less. I can't really be killed, not very easily anyway, so the main aim is to throw me into a bunch of suicidal scenarios and just generally destroy the enemy morale.
Heeeh… then have you thought about what kind of epithet you're going to try to get? You know, in the bingo book.
Not really. Is that important?
In some cases it's not, but in this instance, where your main job is scaring the shit out of people and being a nightmare for them, yeah it really is.
How would I even be able to choose a name? Aren't they posted by enemies?
Oh, that's simple, we just get one of the smaller villages to post you in their books, then whenever one of the bigger villages decide they want you dead they're pretty much forced to take that data on faith. How else do you think names like "Shinobi-no-Kami" got in? No enemy would ever give an actually cool sounding name to someone they hated.
I suppose that's true. So what sorts of names would I try for?
Depends I guess. You have lots of bodies right? So maybe "Thousand Faces" to imply that anyone and everyone they meet could be you in disguise. Or maybe "The Scavenger" since you grabbed up all their injured, like a jackal picking off the weak from the herd, forcing them to pay more attention to their medics and distracting them.
I'll give it some thought. I wouldn't be too surprised if Iwa already was writing one up on me.
Nah, they probably think that raid was by a whole squad of puppeteers, not an individual. The fact that you don't even need to show your main face in combat means that you could easily get multiple entries, then Suna could just acknowledge the one that works the best for what we want.
That's a pretty cool system.
Eh, it's what everyone does to one extent or another. But, word of advice, you don't want to try for something too cool sounding. No one's going to believe some punk called "Crimson Death" or "Black Wind" is actually a bad ass, they'll just think he bribed the right people. And nine times out of ten they'd be right.
Date: Four months twenty two days since awakening
Subject: Sea country
I've been working on my puppets, getting set up for the new biome. Got a few seagulls in the works, bought some fish and cephalopods at the market for dissection. Now that I'm at a trade center I might try going back to some of my earlier ideas and give laminates and ceramics a try for my puppets. Those have got to have different pros and cons than wood, especially around here.
This far away from Iwa using ceramics would be a really good counter to Konoha's fire jutsu and Kiri's water.
I've also given some thought to what Kaga said, about planning epithets out ahead of time. The main thing that it reminded me of was the movie Predator, where the alien goes around and hanging his flayed victims from trees and ceilings. Scared the shit out of people, and it would give me an excuse to collect chakra networks without letting on that I'm doing experiments in human-puppetry.
Something to think about at any rate.
Date: Four months twenty eight days since awakening
Subject: Scouting
Got my birds up in the air. Unlike before, the three groups here aren't even trying to hide their encampments, not enough room for it. This is more like Ame, where they all send troops into one area to duke it out. Kiri's on Taro island while Konoha's on Demon island, with the contested zone being Mother island.
I think in the show Kiri won this conflict, since Sea was under their purview, but that might have just as easily been a later war.
I don't really have any plans as yet. My recon over the enemy bases has shown way too many high leveled shinobi to ever pull off any kind of assault. I might be able to sabotage them, or fight them indirectly, I'll work on it.
Date: Five months two days after awakening
Subject: Ceramics
I've taken shredded bamboo and woven it into a lattice structure, then set it into a cast and poured liquid clay into it. That seems to have worked alright, but the material is a lot like plaster. As an experimental piece however it proves my theory correct. I got a few of the shinobi stationed at camp to try throwing fire and water jutsu at it, it stayed pretty much undamaged.
Maybe I can figure out some sort of Earth jutsu that can manipulate the consistency and placement of clay.
AN: If the Kazekage seems really forgiving, it's because he's trying to butter Shuzaku up. I tried to write Kaga as being just super chill, as a juxtaposition from the previous commanders who both took their jobs and the lives of their people really seriously.
Subject: News
I heard that the Iwa teams got pulled back, they'll probably be split up and set to Ame and Kusa. Iwa has it so easy, they have so few borders to guard.
I guess that means that our camp will be scheduled for dismantling as well. It was just here to make sure that Iwa didn't invade, so it'll probably stick around for a few weeks to make sure that the enemy retreat isn't a trick before being taken apart as well.
Akemi decided that if I have so many bodies then there would be no problem in having me take over the whole rations distribution system. It's really just a ploy to make sure I can't keep myself entertained with other bodies.
Date: Three months twenty six days after awakening
Subject: Bored
So bored. What happened to the 10% pants shitting terror I was promised from this war? I want my money back.
Date: Three months thirty days after awakening
Subject: Uuugh
Terry Pratchett once said that humans could fetishize anything except boredom. Ninjas apparently have realized that too.
Fuck them. Fuck them all to hell!
I even tried meditation, that's fucking bored I am. Didn't work. Probably no brainwaves, heartbeat or biological body, so the physiological changes that in turn cause the psychological benefits, which in turn cause physiological benefits, all couldn't happen.
Date: Four months four days after awakening
Subject: Yes!
We're blowing this popsicle stand!
So long Sanji, so long Akemi, you horrid bastards.
Still have to trek back to Suna before being redeployed though.
Date: Four months six days after awakening
Subject: Suna
God I missed this place. Must have spent too much time here as a child, because when I look at the terrain and the buildings all I can think is that it looks like home.
Really screwy.
Genin Shuzaku, you are wanted in the Kazakage's office. Come with us.
Huh? Yes sir.
*fwoofwoofwoosh*
Do you have to use sand for you shunin? You're getting it everywhere.
Kazekage-sama, we've brought him
Good.
So Shuzaku, I've heard you did as well as can be expected out in the field.
Nobody seemed to want to put me to the test so I took a chance to do what I was recruited to do.
Why didn't you report the location of the enemy camp first?
It wouldn't have mattered. None of the people at our camp could have done anything against them, any assault would have been a suicide mission, and they would just changed base locations afterwards. Since I'm the best choice for suicide missions by far, it seemed reasonable to cut out the middle-men and make the mission something achievable.
Hm, logical. Still, I'm going to be putting you under someone that can give better oversight. No more gallivanting off without orders.
Yes sir.
…Now, think critically about the attack. What could you have done to have a higher success rate?
Well, the only thing I can think of is that if I had better puppets, ones designed for close combat or to imitate jutsu, then the damage done to surface encampment would have been much greater.
I thought all the puppeteers had access to those.
Maybe, but I never studied under a puppeteer, so all my puppets have about the same capabilities as fresh genin, though considerably faster and stronger.
I can see how that would be a problem… Not much that can be done about it though! Try to work out how to do what you need as much as you can, take some resources from the Brigade barracks, or buy them with your bounty money. When the war is over we can focus more on getting you up to par.
Right sir. So, where am I being deployed?
Sea country.
That'd be contested territory with Konoha and Kiri right?
Correct. So your talents will be put to good use. They're trying to disrupt our shipping lanes over there. They can't be allowed to succeed or the war will become much harder.
Understood. Have you read about my proposal to have small puppets at all the bases to allow for instant communications?
I have. I can't in good conscience allow you to know the locations of all the bases. However, what we'll do is box up the puppets. That way they won't be able to see where they're going and you won't know the exact locations.
You do realize that I'll still hear anything that's communicated through the network right?
That'll just be reports. All the sensitive orders will still happen by courier.
Yes sir.
Date: Four months seven days after awakening
Subject: Preparations
I've got three days till I have to head to Sea country. I'm not sure how my puppets will do with the water, might have to get some kind of wood varnish or wax to protect them.
It's surprising that Suna nin do well with water at all. But then, they're a bit like Arab traders from the middle ages, they need to trade so badly that they end up going much further afield that any of the other groups.
Though they still rely on ships, not like the Kiri nin that just swim or water walk everywhere. It really wouldn't surprise me if water walking was part of the reason why the explored world is so small. The distance that a shinobi's chakra will last while water waling is much shorter than the distance that an ocean going ship can travel with the winds.
None of the Daimyo are going to trust traders to explore for them, they're using a Confucianist mercantile system where merchants are scum. Which honestly kind of explains Gato, poor guy. And none of the shinobi villages want to engage in exploration when they have enough enemies right where they are. The idea of going off and finding allies is laughable.
Seems kind of contradictory at first, having merchants be reviled but Wind country rely so heavily on trade. Thing is, the traders out of Wind country aren't legally merchants, but rather lower leveled nobles and second sons trying to build up their personal wealth before feeding it into the economy. That's a totally different thing, in the Confucian system.
Date: Four months nine days after awakening
Subject: Aquatic puppets
I've been working on puppets in the shape of cephalopods. My thinking is that tentacles are easier to mimic than fish. Though I've been filling the internals with sand so that they won't float. Floating sea-puppets would be such an embarrassment.
Haven't quite settled on a style to them yet. It will probably depend on what sorts of creatures live around Sea. There's no chance that the area is devoid of cephalopods, the Elemental Nations are a ripoff of Japan, it has them.
Date: Four months twelve days after awakening
Subject: I'm on a boat!
I can't get that song out of my head.
Had to go down to the capital of Wind and catch a boat to Jiro Island.
Nicest thing about being a puppet so far, can't get sea sick since I have no stomach.
Date: Four months twenty days after awakening
Subject: Sea country
Boats are really slow, much slower than foot travel. Still, we finally got there. I spent a lot of the time focusing of other bodies. Some of the disposable puppets I left in Claw, they've started moving more towards the west, so they can wrap around and find a way to Hidden Star village. A few of the communications puppets have been shipped off towards their destinations. I recognize a bit of Ame around one of them, and I think another might be in River country.
You must be Shuzaku, it's a pleasure to meet you. My name's Kaga, I'll be umm, your superior? Your supervisor I guess is more like it. You're the only puppeteer here so all I can really do is sign off on what you need and try to work you into any operations the rest of us have planned.
Thank you for meeting me. I hope we get along well, I'll try to stay out of your way and not make too much trouble.
No, no, don't worry about it. I read the file on you, parts of it are too classified for me but I get the impression that you're supposed to be some kind of terror weapon. Is that right?
More or less. I can't really be killed, not very easily anyway, so the main aim is to throw me into a bunch of suicidal scenarios and just generally destroy the enemy morale.
Heeeh… then have you thought about what kind of epithet you're going to try to get? You know, in the bingo book.
Not really. Is that important?
In some cases it's not, but in this instance, where your main job is scaring the shit out of people and being a nightmare for them, yeah it really is.
How would I even be able to choose a name? Aren't they posted by enemies?
Oh, that's simple, we just get one of the smaller villages to post you in their books, then whenever one of the bigger villages decide they want you dead they're pretty much forced to take that data on faith. How else do you think names like "Shinobi-no-Kami" got in? No enemy would ever give an actually cool sounding name to someone they hated.
I suppose that's true. So what sorts of names would I try for?
Depends I guess. You have lots of bodies right? So maybe "Thousand Faces" to imply that anyone and everyone they meet could be you in disguise. Or maybe "The Scavenger" since you grabbed up all their injured, like a jackal picking off the weak from the herd, forcing them to pay more attention to their medics and distracting them.
I'll give it some thought. I wouldn't be too surprised if Iwa already was writing one up on me.
Nah, they probably think that raid was by a whole squad of puppeteers, not an individual. The fact that you don't even need to show your main face in combat means that you could easily get multiple entries, then Suna could just acknowledge the one that works the best for what we want.
That's a pretty cool system.
Eh, it's what everyone does to one extent or another. But, word of advice, you don't want to try for something too cool sounding. No one's going to believe some punk called "Crimson Death" or "Black Wind" is actually a bad ass, they'll just think he bribed the right people. And nine times out of ten they'd be right.
Date: Four months twenty two days since awakening
Subject: Sea country
I've been working on my puppets, getting set up for the new biome. Got a few seagulls in the works, bought some fish and cephalopods at the market for dissection. Now that I'm at a trade center I might try going back to some of my earlier ideas and give laminates and ceramics a try for my puppets. Those have got to have different pros and cons than wood, especially around here.
This far away from Iwa using ceramics would be a really good counter to Konoha's fire jutsu and Kiri's water.
I've also given some thought to what Kaga said, about planning epithets out ahead of time. The main thing that it reminded me of was the movie Predator, where the alien goes around and hanging his flayed victims from trees and ceilings. Scared the shit out of people, and it would give me an excuse to collect chakra networks without letting on that I'm doing experiments in human-puppetry.
Something to think about at any rate.
Date: Four months twenty eight days since awakening
Subject: Scouting
Got my birds up in the air. Unlike before, the three groups here aren't even trying to hide their encampments, not enough room for it. This is more like Ame, where they all send troops into one area to duke it out. Kiri's on Taro island while Konoha's on Demon island, with the contested zone being Mother island.
I think in the show Kiri won this conflict, since Sea was under their purview, but that might have just as easily been a later war.
I don't really have any plans as yet. My recon over the enemy bases has shown way too many high leveled shinobi to ever pull off any kind of assault. I might be able to sabotage them, or fight them indirectly, I'll work on it.
Date: Five months two days after awakening
Subject: Ceramics
I've taken shredded bamboo and woven it into a lattice structure, then set it into a cast and poured liquid clay into it. That seems to have worked alright, but the material is a lot like plaster. As an experimental piece however it proves my theory correct. I got a few of the shinobi stationed at camp to try throwing fire and water jutsu at it, it stayed pretty much undamaged.
Maybe I can figure out some sort of Earth jutsu that can manipulate the consistency and placement of clay.
AN: If the Kazekage seems really forgiving, it's because he's trying to butter Shuzaku up. I tried to write Kaga as being just super chill, as a juxtaposition from the previous commanders who both took their jobs and the lives of their people really seriously.
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Raids
- Location
- US
Date: Five months three days after awakening
Subject: Update
I was thinking about maybe using what I've learned from making octopod puppets and using it to make ones similar to the Hunters from Halo, or Durge from Star Wars. A giant mass of worms acting as a gestalt whole. There wouldn't be any sort of repair function, but damaging any single part would be a lot less effective, and they'd have a much easier time changing shape to adjust to different enemies.
It might also lead towards the creation of artificial muscles, which could then be used to create more realistic puppets for prime avatars or infiltration. I might want to learn some medical jutsu for that though, I think that if I did the Terminator thing and put fresh skin over the top of a puppet body then I could pump enough medical chakra into it to keep it alive without blood flow, though naturally that might cause some problems with pallor.
Oooi. Shuzaku, you here?
Yeah Kaga.
Given any though on what we talked about?
I have actually. Do you think you could get the genin stationed here to run around with lanterns and insect netting for me? I want a few thousand bugs if you can get them.
What for?
I think I'm going to aim for being called "Thousand Eyes". I'll seed both the other camps, and the whole set of islands with insect watchers. The intelligence from the others will start leaking no matter what they do, which will drive them to paranoia, thinking that there are traitors and spies in their midst. From there a few kidnappings and replacements will fuel their paranoia until they can hardly function well as a unit.
Kiri might stay alright with all this, but Konoha has always prided itself on its teamwork, if they can't trust each other then their teamwork will start to form cracks and they'll be at a disadvantage. Add in the disruption of their supply lines and they'll start to crumble slowly but surely.
Damn! You think you can really pull that off?
Probably. No promises. There are a few things that could possibly counter it. The biggest question would be if the Aburame's kikaichu kill other insects or not. My thinking is probably not, since they eat primarily chakra from their host.
Is there anything else I can do to increase your chances of success?
Do you know who is stationed at the enemy camps?
Only really the big names, I don't keep track of the ones below jounin.
There are that many jounin?
A few for each group, also quite a few from Suna ya know.
Who are the big names you remember?
Well, there's Hiruko, he's not very powerful but seems fairly intelligent about how he fights. Hyuuga Genba, main branch Hyuuga member that's playing chaperone to a few branch clan members. Oh, there's also Maruboshi Kosuke, the Eternal Genin, but he's at upper jounin strength. That's all for Konoha's side.
For Kiri there's Chukichi of the Hiding in Frost, Hozuki Hogestu and two Kaguya clan members.
Fuck… That's a lot of power to contend with.
No one's saying you have to fight those guys. Leave that to us jounin. All you need to do is make sure that the people under their command are sufficiently nervous.
It's actually not that bad overall. The Seven Swordsmen are all off fighting Kumo, Konoha's big names are mostly in Ame along with ours and Iwa's, plus Hanzo the Salamander. This region's, not quite secondary, but the victory would be economic and not political, so there's a lot less emphasis placed on it.
Yeah, I know. It's just that the combat powers of my puppets are each fairly weak, if I had gotten sent to Ame then I'd just be more cannon fodder getting thrown into the grinder.
Have you worked on the flame throwers, spring loaded blades, water projectors, anything like that?
You know about that?
It was in your file
Right. No, not really. I have a bit of an idea on how I could pull some of them off. Flame throwers would probably be a variation on exploding tags, letting the flame out slowly over time instead of all at once. Water bullets would possibly use something similar to an exploding tag to shoot the water out at high pressures. The spring loaded blades could be retracted with a lever, so long as it was part of the puppet as a unit. So the ideas are there.
Should probably stop procrastinating and do that. It'll probably bump the power of your individual puppets up to fresh chunin level, especially since they can use jutsu. I've also got you a share of the recycled scrap pile, in case you want to start using metal for your puppets again. It's all just broken tools and equipment, but that shouldn't be a big deal for what you're wanting it for.
Thanks
Hey, if you can do what you say you can then it's well worth my while.
Date: Five months seven days after awakening
Subject: Bugs
Got my army of insects. The genin have been working hard for me, the insects fill a couple of liter jars. Probably a couple thousand at least it looks like. Not sure how many of those will be damaged from the rough treatment though.
It doesn't really matter, applying seals to insects is a process with exponential growth, which means that it really doesn't take that long no matter how many there are. At least I think it's exponential, I might have that wrong, it might be one of the other forms of geometric progression.
Should have the prototypes for the upgrades to my puppets ready in a few days.
Date: Five months ten days after awakening
Subject: Upgrades
I shipped off the insects to both enemy encampments and the main island, started getting them into position over time. Everything's above ground for these ones, so that makes it easier. Only one team with an Aburame on it, and it seems that the kikaichu don't eat other insects, though I've been keeping mine away from her anyway in case she's an entomophile and decides to examine them by chance.
Got the first set of upgrades ready to test.
Testing of flame thrower: heat is too high for metal, the conductivity causes smoldering where it contacts with the wood. Next time use a ceramic tube. Maybe water cooling?
Testing of water bullet: pressure too low, chakra structure seems needed to combine spherical shape with high velocity. Using other fluids as through a hose, or maximizing the water pressure to act more like a short range pressure cutter might be possible. However, high pressure fire hoses tend to whip out of control if not held securely, indicating that the range between the storage seals and the nozzle would need to be quite short or else the puppet would tear itself to pieces.
Testing of spring release traps and weapons: worked as expected, it was always the simplest aspect. The ability to manipulate internal components of the puppet as a matter of course reduces the majority of the needed mechanical contrivances. The main sections of the limbs and torso are generally open enough that I can toss a few blades into them with no problems.
Next will come arranging them for specialized functions, like the capture puppet Kankuro used at one point.
I know that there are dart throwers and blow guns in my old world, but they either had something to allow for the buildup of gasses, or a flat end for a spring to rest against. Senbon would be the ideal projectile, and indeed there was something I once saw about needle shooters in the show, but I can't quite figure out how they'd be possible without either a specialized cradle or some sort of chakra cheat.
Something like the shuriken rifles from 40k might actually be easier, though it'd have to be hugely oversimplified. Essentially a vertical clip of standard shuriken, with either a crossbow mechanism or a horizontal leaf spring to project it.
Wasn't there Hidden Sky that attacked during this war? Might try to do something with that, they had some pretty nice stuff, and I'm pretty sure they only got defeated due to leafy plot armor, either that or some glaring weakness that got massively exploited.
Date: Five months thirteen days after awakening
Subject: Plots and plans
Submitted my first intelligence report. Enemy patrol routes, movements, rosters, supply schedules. We already had some of it, but the idea here is to publicize what we have by exploiting it as blatantly as possible.
There's a "low risk" area some of the Konoha teams are being sent through for a reward, a break from combat. There's an ambush planned on them. Then there's a medical shipment for the Kiri base scheduled for two days from now, the Kaguya clan members need some of the drugs to deal with their finicky bloodline and berserker tendencies.
After those take place I've got my own plans for a follow up act at their camps.
Date: Five months sixteen days after awakening
Subject: Plot results
Konoha got three dead and six injured from three teams, that's 100% casualties. While our teams only had two injured. For the other mission the shipment was confiscated with ease, one of our guys died but the transport team from Kiri was wiped out to a man.
What I find hilarious is that there's actually a higher chance of becoming a genin in Kiri than Konoha. Konoha, in the show, graduated nine students out of a class of about thirty, less than a third of the class. Kiri has a graduation rate of a little under fifty percent, some of the winners die of their injuries.
Though Konoha did have a batch of backups, people that were mostly desk workers in flak jackets. Having the majority of the civilian population be made up of academy failures probably caused a lot more trouble than it was worth, especially when the daimyo would likely give at least as many benefits as they did. That might all be based on stories though, I've yet to infiltrate Konoha to find out for sure.
Date: Five months twenty days after awakening
Subject: Chemical selection
Sedatives was a good choice before, I'll make sure to grab a few of those. I also want some water soluble poisons dump into water and food supplied. I doubt most of those resources will be unsealed for the shinobi camps, they certainly haven't been anywhere else I've seen, but as a way to turn the civilians working with the shinobi against them it should work great.
Oh, right, I also want to get a few neurotoxins. Do neurotoxins even exist in this world? The fastest poisons we ever see take hours or days to kill, but that might just be a plot thing. Conotoxin could kill in five seconds flat, and a lot of others weren't much slower. It might be kind of like how poisons in Chinese novels work, where they unbalance the chakra system to the point that it starts killing the target. That'd be both a good and bad thing, since it'd mean that poison was somewhat unreliable but that it is also much simpler.
Date: Five months twenty two days after awakening
Subject: Kidnappings
I timed it right, most of the Hyuuga are out on patrols, there are two left and one of them's asleep. Should be early in the second shift of the day, nobody expects an attack just after the sun's come up.
The open toes and heels of shinobi sandals make it so easy to get to non-sensitive spots of the skin. Really, they should fix that. It might have helped that I coated the bugs in topical anesthetic, maybe not, for all I know it's not even enough to have a measurable effect on the sensation.
One bite every half hour, spread across two hours. Yeah, that branch Hyuuga is useless now. Get in my casket!
I love my puppet birds, so useful.
Yeah they'll activate his cursed seal, but probably not for a few hours, and it definitely won't stop me from doing what I want with him.
The other one I'm doing is to grab one of the medics. I think Tsunade trained these ones personally, but she made that stupid rule about them not going into direct combat, they're trained to dodge a lot and be support. That means that none of these guys are any good at fighting.
I've got a bug aimed for one of their mouths.
It sucks to swallow a bug, but it's infinitely worse when that bug clings on behind the uvula and induces vomiting with drops of ipecac.
I'm actually surprised that one worked. Someone suddenly starting coughing and vomiting with little explanation would be suspicious enough to me that I'd suspect enemy action immediately. It will probably never work again, too abnormal.
I really don't want people to start noticing the bugs. I could tamper with the IV drips, cause random deaths amongst the wounded, but that'd cause people to look more closely at the evidence than I'd like. So long as it'd just disappearances and the like then they'll likely assume it's a talented infiltrator, or someone with a travel/stealth jutsu.
Date: Five months twenty three days after awakening
Subject: Leaf nin resources
Placed yin seals in both of the shinobi I took yesterday, rooted through everything I could find. The medic was indeed trained by Tsunade, as part of a batch pumped out from an accelerated six-month course. All he really knew were the Mystical Palm and Chakra Scalpels. Nice jutsu to be sure, but not much direct use to me until I started working more with the living and recently deceased.
The Hyuuga, he didn't last very long after I took him. Activated his own cursed seal. I don't mind, the Juuken is almost useless to me, if I get my chakra onto someone the last thing they need to be worried about is me sealing a few of their tenketsu.
I'm getting a microscope sent over from the hospital tent. I'm curious about this, will probably use the medic as a control, that way I can see what the eyes of a bog-normal guy looks like in comparison to those of a byakugan.
Not quite sure what to expect with that. It's a doujutsu derived from Kaguya herself, so it might be total bullshit, no explanation at all. But then, people have transplanted every kind of doujutsu before, and Madara figured out how to force the evolution of both the sharingan and rinnegan. So it can't be completely irrational.
With update with results of examination.
Subject: Update
I was thinking about maybe using what I've learned from making octopod puppets and using it to make ones similar to the Hunters from Halo, or Durge from Star Wars. A giant mass of worms acting as a gestalt whole. There wouldn't be any sort of repair function, but damaging any single part would be a lot less effective, and they'd have a much easier time changing shape to adjust to different enemies.
It might also lead towards the creation of artificial muscles, which could then be used to create more realistic puppets for prime avatars or infiltration. I might want to learn some medical jutsu for that though, I think that if I did the Terminator thing and put fresh skin over the top of a puppet body then I could pump enough medical chakra into it to keep it alive without blood flow, though naturally that might cause some problems with pallor.
Oooi. Shuzaku, you here?
Yeah Kaga.
Given any though on what we talked about?
I have actually. Do you think you could get the genin stationed here to run around with lanterns and insect netting for me? I want a few thousand bugs if you can get them.
What for?
I think I'm going to aim for being called "Thousand Eyes". I'll seed both the other camps, and the whole set of islands with insect watchers. The intelligence from the others will start leaking no matter what they do, which will drive them to paranoia, thinking that there are traitors and spies in their midst. From there a few kidnappings and replacements will fuel their paranoia until they can hardly function well as a unit.
Kiri might stay alright with all this, but Konoha has always prided itself on its teamwork, if they can't trust each other then their teamwork will start to form cracks and they'll be at a disadvantage. Add in the disruption of their supply lines and they'll start to crumble slowly but surely.
Damn! You think you can really pull that off?
Probably. No promises. There are a few things that could possibly counter it. The biggest question would be if the Aburame's kikaichu kill other insects or not. My thinking is probably not, since they eat primarily chakra from their host.
Is there anything else I can do to increase your chances of success?
Do you know who is stationed at the enemy camps?
Only really the big names, I don't keep track of the ones below jounin.
There are that many jounin?
A few for each group, also quite a few from Suna ya know.
Who are the big names you remember?
Well, there's Hiruko, he's not very powerful but seems fairly intelligent about how he fights. Hyuuga Genba, main branch Hyuuga member that's playing chaperone to a few branch clan members. Oh, there's also Maruboshi Kosuke, the Eternal Genin, but he's at upper jounin strength. That's all for Konoha's side.
For Kiri there's Chukichi of the Hiding in Frost, Hozuki Hogestu and two Kaguya clan members.
Fuck… That's a lot of power to contend with.
No one's saying you have to fight those guys. Leave that to us jounin. All you need to do is make sure that the people under their command are sufficiently nervous.
It's actually not that bad overall. The Seven Swordsmen are all off fighting Kumo, Konoha's big names are mostly in Ame along with ours and Iwa's, plus Hanzo the Salamander. This region's, not quite secondary, but the victory would be economic and not political, so there's a lot less emphasis placed on it.
Yeah, I know. It's just that the combat powers of my puppets are each fairly weak, if I had gotten sent to Ame then I'd just be more cannon fodder getting thrown into the grinder.
Have you worked on the flame throwers, spring loaded blades, water projectors, anything like that?
You know about that?
It was in your file
Right. No, not really. I have a bit of an idea on how I could pull some of them off. Flame throwers would probably be a variation on exploding tags, letting the flame out slowly over time instead of all at once. Water bullets would possibly use something similar to an exploding tag to shoot the water out at high pressures. The spring loaded blades could be retracted with a lever, so long as it was part of the puppet as a unit. So the ideas are there.
Should probably stop procrastinating and do that. It'll probably bump the power of your individual puppets up to fresh chunin level, especially since they can use jutsu. I've also got you a share of the recycled scrap pile, in case you want to start using metal for your puppets again. It's all just broken tools and equipment, but that shouldn't be a big deal for what you're wanting it for.
Thanks
Hey, if you can do what you say you can then it's well worth my while.
Date: Five months seven days after awakening
Subject: Bugs
Got my army of insects. The genin have been working hard for me, the insects fill a couple of liter jars. Probably a couple thousand at least it looks like. Not sure how many of those will be damaged from the rough treatment though.
It doesn't really matter, applying seals to insects is a process with exponential growth, which means that it really doesn't take that long no matter how many there are. At least I think it's exponential, I might have that wrong, it might be one of the other forms of geometric progression.
Should have the prototypes for the upgrades to my puppets ready in a few days.
Date: Five months ten days after awakening
Subject: Upgrades
I shipped off the insects to both enemy encampments and the main island, started getting them into position over time. Everything's above ground for these ones, so that makes it easier. Only one team with an Aburame on it, and it seems that the kikaichu don't eat other insects, though I've been keeping mine away from her anyway in case she's an entomophile and decides to examine them by chance.
Got the first set of upgrades ready to test.
Testing of flame thrower: heat is too high for metal, the conductivity causes smoldering where it contacts with the wood. Next time use a ceramic tube. Maybe water cooling?
Testing of water bullet: pressure too low, chakra structure seems needed to combine spherical shape with high velocity. Using other fluids as through a hose, or maximizing the water pressure to act more like a short range pressure cutter might be possible. However, high pressure fire hoses tend to whip out of control if not held securely, indicating that the range between the storage seals and the nozzle would need to be quite short or else the puppet would tear itself to pieces.
Testing of spring release traps and weapons: worked as expected, it was always the simplest aspect. The ability to manipulate internal components of the puppet as a matter of course reduces the majority of the needed mechanical contrivances. The main sections of the limbs and torso are generally open enough that I can toss a few blades into them with no problems.
Next will come arranging them for specialized functions, like the capture puppet Kankuro used at one point.
I know that there are dart throwers and blow guns in my old world, but they either had something to allow for the buildup of gasses, or a flat end for a spring to rest against. Senbon would be the ideal projectile, and indeed there was something I once saw about needle shooters in the show, but I can't quite figure out how they'd be possible without either a specialized cradle or some sort of chakra cheat.
Something like the shuriken rifles from 40k might actually be easier, though it'd have to be hugely oversimplified. Essentially a vertical clip of standard shuriken, with either a crossbow mechanism or a horizontal leaf spring to project it.
Wasn't there Hidden Sky that attacked during this war? Might try to do something with that, they had some pretty nice stuff, and I'm pretty sure they only got defeated due to leafy plot armor, either that or some glaring weakness that got massively exploited.
Date: Five months thirteen days after awakening
Subject: Plots and plans
Submitted my first intelligence report. Enemy patrol routes, movements, rosters, supply schedules. We already had some of it, but the idea here is to publicize what we have by exploiting it as blatantly as possible.
There's a "low risk" area some of the Konoha teams are being sent through for a reward, a break from combat. There's an ambush planned on them. Then there's a medical shipment for the Kiri base scheduled for two days from now, the Kaguya clan members need some of the drugs to deal with their finicky bloodline and berserker tendencies.
After those take place I've got my own plans for a follow up act at their camps.
Date: Five months sixteen days after awakening
Subject: Plot results
Konoha got three dead and six injured from three teams, that's 100% casualties. While our teams only had two injured. For the other mission the shipment was confiscated with ease, one of our guys died but the transport team from Kiri was wiped out to a man.
What I find hilarious is that there's actually a higher chance of becoming a genin in Kiri than Konoha. Konoha, in the show, graduated nine students out of a class of about thirty, less than a third of the class. Kiri has a graduation rate of a little under fifty percent, some of the winners die of their injuries.
Though Konoha did have a batch of backups, people that were mostly desk workers in flak jackets. Having the majority of the civilian population be made up of academy failures probably caused a lot more trouble than it was worth, especially when the daimyo would likely give at least as many benefits as they did. That might all be based on stories though, I've yet to infiltrate Konoha to find out for sure.
Date: Five months twenty days after awakening
Subject: Chemical selection
Sedatives was a good choice before, I'll make sure to grab a few of those. I also want some water soluble poisons dump into water and food supplied. I doubt most of those resources will be unsealed for the shinobi camps, they certainly haven't been anywhere else I've seen, but as a way to turn the civilians working with the shinobi against them it should work great.
Oh, right, I also want to get a few neurotoxins. Do neurotoxins even exist in this world? The fastest poisons we ever see take hours or days to kill, but that might just be a plot thing. Conotoxin could kill in five seconds flat, and a lot of others weren't much slower. It might be kind of like how poisons in Chinese novels work, where they unbalance the chakra system to the point that it starts killing the target. That'd be both a good and bad thing, since it'd mean that poison was somewhat unreliable but that it is also much simpler.
Date: Five months twenty two days after awakening
Subject: Kidnappings
I timed it right, most of the Hyuuga are out on patrols, there are two left and one of them's asleep. Should be early in the second shift of the day, nobody expects an attack just after the sun's come up.
The open toes and heels of shinobi sandals make it so easy to get to non-sensitive spots of the skin. Really, they should fix that. It might have helped that I coated the bugs in topical anesthetic, maybe not, for all I know it's not even enough to have a measurable effect on the sensation.
One bite every half hour, spread across two hours. Yeah, that branch Hyuuga is useless now. Get in my casket!
I love my puppet birds, so useful.
Yeah they'll activate his cursed seal, but probably not for a few hours, and it definitely won't stop me from doing what I want with him.
The other one I'm doing is to grab one of the medics. I think Tsunade trained these ones personally, but she made that stupid rule about them not going into direct combat, they're trained to dodge a lot and be support. That means that none of these guys are any good at fighting.
I've got a bug aimed for one of their mouths.
It sucks to swallow a bug, but it's infinitely worse when that bug clings on behind the uvula and induces vomiting with drops of ipecac.
I'm actually surprised that one worked. Someone suddenly starting coughing and vomiting with little explanation would be suspicious enough to me that I'd suspect enemy action immediately. It will probably never work again, too abnormal.
I really don't want people to start noticing the bugs. I could tamper with the IV drips, cause random deaths amongst the wounded, but that'd cause people to look more closely at the evidence than I'd like. So long as it'd just disappearances and the like then they'll likely assume it's a talented infiltrator, or someone with a travel/stealth jutsu.
Date: Five months twenty three days after awakening
Subject: Leaf nin resources
Placed yin seals in both of the shinobi I took yesterday, rooted through everything I could find. The medic was indeed trained by Tsunade, as part of a batch pumped out from an accelerated six-month course. All he really knew were the Mystical Palm and Chakra Scalpels. Nice jutsu to be sure, but not much direct use to me until I started working more with the living and recently deceased.
The Hyuuga, he didn't last very long after I took him. Activated his own cursed seal. I don't mind, the Juuken is almost useless to me, if I get my chakra onto someone the last thing they need to be worried about is me sealing a few of their tenketsu.
I'm getting a microscope sent over from the hospital tent. I'm curious about this, will probably use the medic as a control, that way I can see what the eyes of a bog-normal guy looks like in comparison to those of a byakugan.
Not quite sure what to expect with that. It's a doujutsu derived from Kaguya herself, so it might be total bullshit, no explanation at all. But then, people have transplanted every kind of doujutsu before, and Madara figured out how to force the evolution of both the sharingan and rinnegan. So it can't be completely irrational.
With update with results of examination.
Last edited:
Byakugan
- Location
- US
Date: Five months twenty four days after awakening
Subject: Byakugan examination
After peeling back the skin around the eyes of both bodies I began to examine the chakra network and compare them. They appear to be exactly the same in gross structure, a large coil passing under the orbital socket and entering behind the retina.
The blood vessels of the Hyuuga were very different, with engorged veins flowing to the muscles of the eye socket. It seems that the intended function of the increased blood flow is to freeze the eyes in place, to remove the micro-fluctuations and allow for the all-seeing aspects to function correctly. That would also explain the issue of eye strain from prolonged use, as the eyes are really not meant to stay still for any length of time, nor the muscles that tense. This also explains the enlarged blood vessels in the iris, as that area of the eye also traditionally has to move in order to refocus.
Aside from that, there weren't a lot of obvious differences. Even under a microscope the back of the Hyuuga's retina had no real differences from the Medic's.
Oh! It's been about an hour after the cessation of heart beat, the chakra in the body seems to be decreasing steadily. The odd thing is that the byakugan eyes seem to be changing as well.
Well fuck.
I know, I know. They always call them dojutsu, "eye techniques" but I never really thought about what that meant before. It seems that it really is a technique that is being used with the eyes as a medium. A technique that is inherited and perfectly instinctual to the user, habitual to the bits of chakra coil in the eye, one that is likely impossible to imitate with handseals due to the nature of bloodline limits.
…That changes things considerably.
It really helps explain how things like the sharingan can have apparently moving holes in their iris. It makes sense if the eyes are just an instinctual application of a jutsu.
Taking a look at the chakra coils around the eyes now. Looks like the Caged Bird seal poisons the coils, so that the eyes can't be transplanted and no children can be created from artificial insemination. But that doesn't stop the eyes themselves from working when chakra is externally applied.
Yup. A slight flow of chakra into the coils around the eyes cause passive activation of the byakugan, enough to cause them to show up as pale and seemingly covered in cataracts. In the show a handseal was often used to aid in activating the eyes, not sure which one that would have been but I'm guessing it was related to either concentration or trying to pulse the chakra to the eyes to cause the hyper-awareness.
Huh, it was the concentration, I was betting on it being a chakra pulse.
I'm… not sure what would happen to me if I tried attaching these to a puppet as is. Technically they do have chakra networks, but they aren't alive, and those networks are all connected together into the greater whole. So it's possible that whatever chakra poison is in the eyes could infect the entire network.
I'm just going to store them until I can figure out from examination of coils themselves exactly how a jutsu is formed.
I do have that Medic, and the knowledge of the jutsu from his head. If I use what I know and what I know he knew, then I could compare the two to see how the individual jutsu got transformed.
Date: Five months twenty five days after awakening
Subject: Medic's jutsu
I had to start by practicing the jutsu myself a bit. Both the Mystical Palm and Chakra Scalpels get expelled as chakra out of the hands. There are twenty three tenketsu in each hand, which means that the degree of variation which the chakra can have is quite large.
Never mind, that doesn't seem to have any impact on how the jutsu get made. I can make a scalpel off of my pinky, or my index finger, or my thumb, there's no difference but practical utility.
Looking more closely at the coils in the Medic's hands, it seems that when chakra with the correct yin structure, the right idea behind it, passes through them they instinctively attempt to mold the justu.
Troubling. It means that the point at issue is the chakra coils themselves. No one has any idea how to make artificial coils, or how to transplant them. I only have a few theories about what coils even are.
Sure I can watch how the molding of the chakra takes place and try to copy it, but that might not be enough for bloodline traits, where their physiology and souls are aiding the process of the jutsu itself.
That doesn't mean I have nowhere to progress however. If I can figure out how the byakugan actually perceives chakra then that might allow me to create a knockoff that does not rely on biology or chakra coils at all.
Date: Five months twenty nine days after awakening
Subject: Visual chakra sensing
The way that the byakugan presents reality to its users has always seemed peculiar to me. They see a solid sphere, but beyond their specific range they can't see anything. Then there's the infamous blindspot, and the way they can see chakra through mundane objects but see the world in a largely distorted way.
The only way that this makes sense is if they are only seeing the chakra. The blindspot would be where the chakra coil enters the eye and would appear to be a giant bright blob of solid chakra.
I've looked at the functioning eyes as much as possible, which wasn't easy given I couldn't implant them, and as best as I can figure the eyes act as a way to represent chakra senses visually. Most likely, and I'm guessing here, they use the ambient nature chakra as a passive medium and then detect all the non-nature chakra within that ether. Otherwise the hard edge of the visual range makes little sense.
Byakugan users would never take in any nature chakra, they would just exploit its existence. Giving them something akin to a sage's sensing ability and then filtering that in through the eyes for easier cognitive processing.
Certainly a viable explanation for something that originated from Kaguya herself.
From what I can remember, regular chakra sensing comes in a couple different varieties. The person either pings out with their chakra like sonar, or they feel for ambient changes similar to what a sense of smell does with particulates. Regular sage mode senses probably work by the former method, probably. Which would make the byakugan a third approach, and one of the more complicated.
Not sure if Karin's method is all that unique as well of if it's just another derivation of the same handful of methods.
Date: Six months three days after awakening
Subject: Attack on Mist
Konoha may be having issues with trying to patch up non-existent security issues, but in the Kiri camp Chukichi pretty much immediately started trying to figure out if there was a mole. I don't know exactly what he told every one of his chunin, but he definitely told them all different things about the coming plans.
Regardless, when he tells one of them to circle around the island to hit a trade ship from Wind, then it's obvious that that's where the chunin is going to lead his team.
Date: Six months five days after awakening
Subject: Sooo fucked
I told Kaga about my information and he set up a strike team to take them out before they could sink our ships. Only, he wanted me to send along some puppets as well.
I figured it couldn't hurt, they were just recently refitted with traps and equipment so it would be a good test run.
The Suna team caught up with the ships before they could enter the combat area and hid inside them, then when the Kiri squad came out from under the water the Suna teams reciprocated.
That's when things got shot to shit. Chukichi followed the Kiri team to see if the mission had been reported to the enemy. He killed fucking everybody. The Kiri nin, the Suna nin, the god damned sailors, all dead. I tried to hold him off for a while, throwing dozens of disposable bodies at him, trying out every new trick I had learned, but he filled the area up with mist and started slaughtering indiscriminately, it was like trying to fight an angry god.
This is what an elite jounin is like. What a mess.
Kiri can probably afford to lose a couple of guys in an effort to ensure they've purged any traitors, but Suna can't. Those teams were important to this front, my puppet squads took time and resources to make, that ship carried food and weapons necessary for our fight.
How did I not figure out what he was going to do? It was obvious he was going to check up on those he suspected.
It's all my fault. I didn't double check my information before sending it out. Fuck!
Oh, and worse still, he took all the bodies of both the Suna and Kiri nin back with him, so I can't even scavenge up anything from the losses.
Konoha is getting a pass for the moment, I can't let this kind of shit stand.
Date: Six months seven days after awakening
Subject: Reneg
I just said a couple of days ago that I was going to focus everything on the Kiri camp *sigh*, but this has been in the works for a while, so whatever.
I've got all these nice octopod puppets filled with shards of broken kunai and explosive tags. Like face-huggers meet claymore mines. The plan is to use them in random bursts against Konoha's beach patrol, make them fear the water.
Date: Six months eight days after awakening
Subject: After action report
I started off by trying to get a baker's dozen of my little octobombs over to Demon Island, that took a while. Without a central torso to squirt water behind them, they needed to actually use their tentacles to walk along the ocean floor. Really slow.
I'll need to fix that once I get the water jets worked out.
Anyway. After that it was mostly a matter of waiting for patrols to pass. There was a flaw in my plan, in that there aren't all that many shinobi on patrol at once, only two really two teams. But the ideal situation was never to kill a lot of people, rather it was to make the most ubiquitous aspect of the current environment seems threatening.
Launching half of my puppets at each team resulted in most of the puppet being destroyed before they could get near. However one of them did latch onto a chunin's legs and pretty much blew him in half, while another did some serious shrapnel damage.
I'm not sure if suicidal puppets and mobile bombs are really worth the effort. Just designing these things takes a while, they're pretty specialized. Then I have to learn to move them, and there generally isn't any room for extra weapons. It's probably more effort than it's worth.
I think I need to find someone that's skilled at kenjutsu or taijutsu, something so that I can dramatically increase the close quarters effectiveness of all of my puppets at once.
AN: I spent quite a while trying to rationalize how the byakugan worked, this is what I came up with. You can read the naruto wiki page on it, but the main supporting evidence is that people have to activate their byakugan, it's just that it normally happens as soon as they have chakra flowing. One guy awakened only one of his eyes as a byakugan, Kishimoto said that if the Hyuuga and an Uchiha had children then he would have one doujutsu in each eye, and similar stuff. It also helps explain why they're even called doujutsu.
This
Is a fairly good image of the chakra network, you can see what I was talking about by looking at the head region.
Life's not too easy for Shuzaku, he has to struggle a bit to achieve what he wants out of life. I hate those stories where the protagonist gets everything he tries for right off the bat. Most conflicts result in less than ideal outcomes, most research ends in failure. He's mostly angry at himself for not thinking ahead a bunch, not outsmarting an internationally renouned professional killer. That and he's really goal orientated, so failure causes psychological self flagellation.
Subject: Byakugan examination
After peeling back the skin around the eyes of both bodies I began to examine the chakra network and compare them. They appear to be exactly the same in gross structure, a large coil passing under the orbital socket and entering behind the retina.
The blood vessels of the Hyuuga were very different, with engorged veins flowing to the muscles of the eye socket. It seems that the intended function of the increased blood flow is to freeze the eyes in place, to remove the micro-fluctuations and allow for the all-seeing aspects to function correctly. That would also explain the issue of eye strain from prolonged use, as the eyes are really not meant to stay still for any length of time, nor the muscles that tense. This also explains the enlarged blood vessels in the iris, as that area of the eye also traditionally has to move in order to refocus.
Aside from that, there weren't a lot of obvious differences. Even under a microscope the back of the Hyuuga's retina had no real differences from the Medic's.
Oh! It's been about an hour after the cessation of heart beat, the chakra in the body seems to be decreasing steadily. The odd thing is that the byakugan eyes seem to be changing as well.
Well fuck.
I know, I know. They always call them dojutsu, "eye techniques" but I never really thought about what that meant before. It seems that it really is a technique that is being used with the eyes as a medium. A technique that is inherited and perfectly instinctual to the user, habitual to the bits of chakra coil in the eye, one that is likely impossible to imitate with handseals due to the nature of bloodline limits.
…That changes things considerably.
It really helps explain how things like the sharingan can have apparently moving holes in their iris. It makes sense if the eyes are just an instinctual application of a jutsu.
Taking a look at the chakra coils around the eyes now. Looks like the Caged Bird seal poisons the coils, so that the eyes can't be transplanted and no children can be created from artificial insemination. But that doesn't stop the eyes themselves from working when chakra is externally applied.
Yup. A slight flow of chakra into the coils around the eyes cause passive activation of the byakugan, enough to cause them to show up as pale and seemingly covered in cataracts. In the show a handseal was often used to aid in activating the eyes, not sure which one that would have been but I'm guessing it was related to either concentration or trying to pulse the chakra to the eyes to cause the hyper-awareness.
Huh, it was the concentration, I was betting on it being a chakra pulse.
I'm… not sure what would happen to me if I tried attaching these to a puppet as is. Technically they do have chakra networks, but they aren't alive, and those networks are all connected together into the greater whole. So it's possible that whatever chakra poison is in the eyes could infect the entire network.
I'm just going to store them until I can figure out from examination of coils themselves exactly how a jutsu is formed.
I do have that Medic, and the knowledge of the jutsu from his head. If I use what I know and what I know he knew, then I could compare the two to see how the individual jutsu got transformed.
Date: Five months twenty five days after awakening
Subject: Medic's jutsu
I had to start by practicing the jutsu myself a bit. Both the Mystical Palm and Chakra Scalpels get expelled as chakra out of the hands. There are twenty three tenketsu in each hand, which means that the degree of variation which the chakra can have is quite large.
Never mind, that doesn't seem to have any impact on how the jutsu get made. I can make a scalpel off of my pinky, or my index finger, or my thumb, there's no difference but practical utility.
Looking more closely at the coils in the Medic's hands, it seems that when chakra with the correct yin structure, the right idea behind it, passes through them they instinctively attempt to mold the justu.
Troubling. It means that the point at issue is the chakra coils themselves. No one has any idea how to make artificial coils, or how to transplant them. I only have a few theories about what coils even are.
Sure I can watch how the molding of the chakra takes place and try to copy it, but that might not be enough for bloodline traits, where their physiology and souls are aiding the process of the jutsu itself.
That doesn't mean I have nowhere to progress however. If I can figure out how the byakugan actually perceives chakra then that might allow me to create a knockoff that does not rely on biology or chakra coils at all.
Date: Five months twenty nine days after awakening
Subject: Visual chakra sensing
The way that the byakugan presents reality to its users has always seemed peculiar to me. They see a solid sphere, but beyond their specific range they can't see anything. Then there's the infamous blindspot, and the way they can see chakra through mundane objects but see the world in a largely distorted way.
The only way that this makes sense is if they are only seeing the chakra. The blindspot would be where the chakra coil enters the eye and would appear to be a giant bright blob of solid chakra.
I've looked at the functioning eyes as much as possible, which wasn't easy given I couldn't implant them, and as best as I can figure the eyes act as a way to represent chakra senses visually. Most likely, and I'm guessing here, they use the ambient nature chakra as a passive medium and then detect all the non-nature chakra within that ether. Otherwise the hard edge of the visual range makes little sense.
Byakugan users would never take in any nature chakra, they would just exploit its existence. Giving them something akin to a sage's sensing ability and then filtering that in through the eyes for easier cognitive processing.
Certainly a viable explanation for something that originated from Kaguya herself.
From what I can remember, regular chakra sensing comes in a couple different varieties. The person either pings out with their chakra like sonar, or they feel for ambient changes similar to what a sense of smell does with particulates. Regular sage mode senses probably work by the former method, probably. Which would make the byakugan a third approach, and one of the more complicated.
Not sure if Karin's method is all that unique as well of if it's just another derivation of the same handful of methods.
Date: Six months three days after awakening
Subject: Attack on Mist
Konoha may be having issues with trying to patch up non-existent security issues, but in the Kiri camp Chukichi pretty much immediately started trying to figure out if there was a mole. I don't know exactly what he told every one of his chunin, but he definitely told them all different things about the coming plans.
Regardless, when he tells one of them to circle around the island to hit a trade ship from Wind, then it's obvious that that's where the chunin is going to lead his team.
Date: Six months five days after awakening
Subject: Sooo fucked
I told Kaga about my information and he set up a strike team to take them out before they could sink our ships. Only, he wanted me to send along some puppets as well.
I figured it couldn't hurt, they were just recently refitted with traps and equipment so it would be a good test run.
The Suna team caught up with the ships before they could enter the combat area and hid inside them, then when the Kiri squad came out from under the water the Suna teams reciprocated.
That's when things got shot to shit. Chukichi followed the Kiri team to see if the mission had been reported to the enemy. He killed fucking everybody. The Kiri nin, the Suna nin, the god damned sailors, all dead. I tried to hold him off for a while, throwing dozens of disposable bodies at him, trying out every new trick I had learned, but he filled the area up with mist and started slaughtering indiscriminately, it was like trying to fight an angry god.
This is what an elite jounin is like. What a mess.
Kiri can probably afford to lose a couple of guys in an effort to ensure they've purged any traitors, but Suna can't. Those teams were important to this front, my puppet squads took time and resources to make, that ship carried food and weapons necessary for our fight.
How did I not figure out what he was going to do? It was obvious he was going to check up on those he suspected.
It's all my fault. I didn't double check my information before sending it out. Fuck!
Oh, and worse still, he took all the bodies of both the Suna and Kiri nin back with him, so I can't even scavenge up anything from the losses.
Konoha is getting a pass for the moment, I can't let this kind of shit stand.
Date: Six months seven days after awakening
Subject: Reneg
I just said a couple of days ago that I was going to focus everything on the Kiri camp *sigh*, but this has been in the works for a while, so whatever.
I've got all these nice octopod puppets filled with shards of broken kunai and explosive tags. Like face-huggers meet claymore mines. The plan is to use them in random bursts against Konoha's beach patrol, make them fear the water.
Date: Six months eight days after awakening
Subject: After action report
I started off by trying to get a baker's dozen of my little octobombs over to Demon Island, that took a while. Without a central torso to squirt water behind them, they needed to actually use their tentacles to walk along the ocean floor. Really slow.
I'll need to fix that once I get the water jets worked out.
Anyway. After that it was mostly a matter of waiting for patrols to pass. There was a flaw in my plan, in that there aren't all that many shinobi on patrol at once, only two really two teams. But the ideal situation was never to kill a lot of people, rather it was to make the most ubiquitous aspect of the current environment seems threatening.
Launching half of my puppets at each team resulted in most of the puppet being destroyed before they could get near. However one of them did latch onto a chunin's legs and pretty much blew him in half, while another did some serious shrapnel damage.
I'm not sure if suicidal puppets and mobile bombs are really worth the effort. Just designing these things takes a while, they're pretty specialized. Then I have to learn to move them, and there generally isn't any room for extra weapons. It's probably more effort than it's worth.
I think I need to find someone that's skilled at kenjutsu or taijutsu, something so that I can dramatically increase the close quarters effectiveness of all of my puppets at once.
AN: I spent quite a while trying to rationalize how the byakugan worked, this is what I came up with. You can read the naruto wiki page on it, but the main supporting evidence is that people have to activate their byakugan, it's just that it normally happens as soon as they have chakra flowing. One guy awakened only one of his eyes as a byakugan, Kishimoto said that if the Hyuuga and an Uchiha had children then he would have one doujutsu in each eye, and similar stuff. It also helps explain why they're even called doujutsu.
This
Life's not too easy for Shuzaku, he has to struggle a bit to achieve what he wants out of life. I hate those stories where the protagonist gets everything he tries for right off the bat. Most conflicts result in less than ideal outcomes, most research ends in failure. He's mostly angry at himself for not thinking ahead a bunch, not outsmarting an internationally renouned professional killer. That and he's really goal orientated, so failure causes psychological self flagellation.
Hunting
- Location
- US
Date: Six months nine days after awakening
Subject: Pre-planning
How can I get back at Chukichi for humiliating me like that? I can't fight him, he'd slaughter me, I can't do too many attacks on his camp since he might decide to respond in kind. I need to gain better combat effectiveness before I can really ruin his career.
Right, I'll focus on hunting down units on Mother island and sabotaging groups that move away from the main camp.
Actually, yeah, I take back what I said before. Konoha is free game, until I have the skills to really screw with Chukichi I can't be picky about whom I go after.
The advantage I have here is that my main ninjutsu is Earth release, whereas everyone here is mainly focused on Fire, Water and Wind. Not to say that each group doesn't have outliers, but still...
Up in Claw the other Suna nin would sleep on steel mats, so that they couldn't be dragged down into the ground. No one does that here, the expectation of massed subterranean assault is absent, and one or two Earth users would normally not be enough of a threat to matter against a whole squad.
Yeah. That's how I'll start.
Date: Six months eleven days after awakening
Subject: New disposable puppets
I've been working on quick production clay puppets. I finally got enough progress with the Earth transformation training that I can form the clay into appropriate shapes. I tried to make the microscopic structure interlock, but either I don't have enough control, or ninjutsu can't directly affect particles that small, or the nature of clay here is different. I don't quite know just yet.
Haven't figured out what I can use as biological material inside the clay just yet. Thinking of going with bone ash, but that might not be of much use with the stoneware quality clay. Plus getting that much bone and refining it down would be a bit of a pain.
Maybe mixing powdered blood into a silica glaze? Hmm. Not sure how well that would work, plus having the biological component on the outside would make it all the easier to remove in battle.
Animal skins? The latent chakra networks might cause unpredictable changes and fluctuations unless I took the time to arrange them individually.
Problem is I really don't want something water soluble or flammable, even if I stuck hairs deep inside the clay they would likely be broken down and destroyed if the puppet were exposed to a fireball.
Well, I guess there's nothing for it, I'll have to do without. It'll just be slightly more difficult to maneuver them.
I've got flame throwers installed in the arms of the puppets, now that I don't have the wooden exterior I don't have to worry about heat conductivity.
Hidden weapons can't really be used to the same extent, ceramics aren't quite as forgiving in regards to tiny slats and concealed mechanisms. Even with the internals reinforced with metal the chances of some hidden opening chipping are really high.
Date: Six months thirteen days after awakening
Subject: Moving into position
What's that process birds and fish use to reduce resistance? Tailgating! Right. Even with tailgating under the ocean floor it still took like three hours to get them all in position.
Tricky bit was figuring out how to match up the exact location above ground with where I knew they were underground. Since puppets can only see their surroundings subjectively it's really hard to coordinate together with the avian scout puppets when they can't see the same environment.
Date: Six months fourteen days after awakening
Subject: Trap set
Konoha squad coming through. Don't recognize any of the faces, must not be very famous. Chunin though, so I can't afford to underestimate them. Must be wary for plot armor.
Date: Six months fourteen days after awakening
Subject: After action report
Started by dragging the one at the rear under the ground. Subterranean fights generally rely on who can hold their breath the longest, and puppets don't breathe. Wouldn't work like that for a skilled Earth user though.
The other two responded by jumping into the trees, not something I have a strong counter for at this point.
Attacking with ranged bombardment from multiple directions didn't have any noticeable effect, they managed to deflect consistently.
The one the northern side closed to engage, the other one cast a wide area affect genjutsu. Probably didn't realize that they were being attacked by puppets, unfortunate since the genjutsu actually worked.
Had to cut off awareness of those puppets and submerge them under the ground. Back ups were sent in in the form of rodents and birds, using the same kawarimi tactic I used in my first engagement in Claw. The rapid switching had a noticeable effect on the close range fighter, very distracting but not very damaging.
After the few seconds it took to purge the genjutsu from the puppets they reemerged. Trying flamethrowers against the genjutsu user seemed largely effective, disrupting any further attempts at casting illusions. At that point I had one puppet switch out with a diving bird puppet and drag the genjutsu user under the ground.
The final fight with the taijutsu user was just a slog. He couldn't damage my puppets faster than they could damage him.
Would have been considerably easier if I started lacing my blades with drugs.
Date: Six months fifteen days after awakening
Subject: Capture results
Looks like it was a standard Nin-Gen-Tai squad, well rounded but not exceptional. The ninjutsu user turned out to be a kunoichi from the Sarutobi clan, had a couple of decent fire jutsu and Fire transformation training skills, but she was really pretty low down on the internal clan hierarchy.
The other two were clanless. One a civilian born, son of a baker, the other an orphan. The orphan was trying to seduce his Sarutobi teammate in an attempt at gaining clan backing. How adorably twisted in his affections.
Orphan-boy was the taijutsu user, he relied a lot on body reinforcement, kind of similar in style to a knock off goken. Might be useful. I did like the skills at deflecting incoming projectiles, he must have trained that a lot, very nice.
The baker's son was the genjutsu user, apparently his parents didn't want him being a close ranged attacker, trying to minimize his risks in combat and pushed him into the ranged support option.
Anyway, got the Phoenix Sage and Great Flame techniques from the Sarutobi girl, the latter was their clan exclusive jutsu. Kind of a pain though, Fire release is just so meh. It's neither more effective nor as cheap as the flame throwers I already have. Plus the jutsu are all so similar, they just burn shit, no supplemental or defensive ones at all.
Nabbed the False Surroundings and Hell Viewing genjutsu from the other guy. Sweet! I like those. My thinking on genjutsu is basically just that the more prescribed the result and second less real it seems the more useless it will be. A lot of the higher ranked genjutsu have very specific outcomes and look completely surreal, it's obvious in the extreme that the person isn't viewing reality and then they just have to figure out how to escape.
However, for these two genjutsu it's not like that. The False Surroundings technique is designed to just slightly change the environment, while the Hell Viewing technique causes the mind to invent its own worst fear and see it as real.
Plus, I have an advantage for genjutsu in that I can already separate out pure yin chakra, just like the current Mizukage, which makes it much harder to detect and dispel. I can see a lot of possible uses for those two genjutsu used in conjunction.
And, if I can twist the Hell Viewing technique around to also see what they want most, then I'd have a ninja corollary for both Boggarts and the Mirror of Erised, pretty effective ways of hashing out a quick and dirty personality evaluation.
Date: Six months seventeen days after awakening
Subject: Scouting
Both the enemy camps have taken to only giving out order as they send people out, then have them plan while en-route. Unfortunately this doesn't give me a lot of time to figure out their plans and react to them.
Longer missions are easier to interfere with though. A Kiri team is heading over the ocean to Moon Kingdom, which seems to be a relay station of theirs. I can just set up a trap for them in between, but I'll only be able to hit them on their way back, since they've already left and are too far away to catch up to.
Date: Six months twenty one days after awakening
Subject: Here they come
Team incoming. Escort mission? That wasn't on their orders. Either that or that person is a new transfer.
The plan stays as is. If some escape then it's still fine.
Date: Six months twenty one days after awakening
Subject: After action report
Used the False Surroundings area affect genjutsu to hide my puppets. Basically just made them look like rocks and mounds of mud on the sea floor.
This turned out to be a good thing as those with a strong Water release can sense the flow of water they are in contact with by infiltrating part of their chakra into it.
Once I have some sort of chakra sensing ability I'll have to practice on ensuring that I can use genjutsu to fool it.
When the Kiri nin passed onto the beach some of my puppets came up from out of the water and attacked with flame throwers. That was a mistake in hindsight, the flames across the low water level of the beach gave them too much steam to play with.
Still, it was partly alright, given that the puppets left underground still managed to attack them from below. Not so good was that they immediately rose the water table, turned the area to mud and then used their combined chakra to overpower my control over the Earth technique.
I wasn't even aware that was possible.
…Or, well, chakra magic, anything's possible, but I wasn't aware it was something I had to watch out for.
I got a few of them out of the situation by using shunshin, but most of those puppets got dragged down and broken by high pressure mud.
I managed to incapacitate one of the chunin with a drugged kunai and abscond with him. It was only after that that the guy they were escorting came into play.
He smiled.
His teeth were fully serrated.
Sure I got some decent taijutsu from before, but against someone like that… Yeah, my puppets got sliced to ribbons and smashed to pieces. Ceramics might be good against Fire and Water, but they're shit against decent weapons skills.
Date: Six months twenty two days after awakening
Subject: Kiri chunin
Kenjutsu user primarily. Dreamt of joining the Seven Swordsmen as a child, didn't have the gumption to pull it off. Admired the guy they were escorting, who is named Fujisaki Akira, because he was accepted as a potential heir for the Kiba.
Don't recognize the name, might mean he died in canon, might mean he was just never mentioned. The Kiba swords are supposed to be insanely sharp, which would help explain why he was able to cut through my puppets like that, but even if that wasn't the case I doubt I would have been able to defeat him on open ground.
I… wouldn't really call what this chunin used 'swordsmanship', more like 'magical sword arts', he focused a lot more on figuring out how to use chakra flow on his blade and use it together with Silent Killing than he did learning correct forms.
That seems to be a common problem, people focus too much on flashy jutsu and too little on fundamentals. No wonder the Samurai are a legitimate threat when they just focus on one or two chakra techniques as supplemental to their actual sword styles.
I imagine that the actual Seven Swordsmen and their apprentices are probably outliers though. The one I saw certainly seems like he was.
Oh! Silent Killing, not a jutsu. Just learning how to move very silently while not releasing any killing intent. Hmm, killing intent is something I'll have to look into, it might make sense under certain conditions.
Can't really fully exploit the Silent Killing skills without both practice and specially modifying the joints of my puppets. The lack of breathing and need for clothing makes it easier though, so I might start with that and work from there.
Subject: Pre-planning
How can I get back at Chukichi for humiliating me like that? I can't fight him, he'd slaughter me, I can't do too many attacks on his camp since he might decide to respond in kind. I need to gain better combat effectiveness before I can really ruin his career.
Right, I'll focus on hunting down units on Mother island and sabotaging groups that move away from the main camp.
Actually, yeah, I take back what I said before. Konoha is free game, until I have the skills to really screw with Chukichi I can't be picky about whom I go after.
The advantage I have here is that my main ninjutsu is Earth release, whereas everyone here is mainly focused on Fire, Water and Wind. Not to say that each group doesn't have outliers, but still...
Up in Claw the other Suna nin would sleep on steel mats, so that they couldn't be dragged down into the ground. No one does that here, the expectation of massed subterranean assault is absent, and one or two Earth users would normally not be enough of a threat to matter against a whole squad.
Yeah. That's how I'll start.
Date: Six months eleven days after awakening
Subject: New disposable puppets
I've been working on quick production clay puppets. I finally got enough progress with the Earth transformation training that I can form the clay into appropriate shapes. I tried to make the microscopic structure interlock, but either I don't have enough control, or ninjutsu can't directly affect particles that small, or the nature of clay here is different. I don't quite know just yet.
Haven't figured out what I can use as biological material inside the clay just yet. Thinking of going with bone ash, but that might not be of much use with the stoneware quality clay. Plus getting that much bone and refining it down would be a bit of a pain.
Maybe mixing powdered blood into a silica glaze? Hmm. Not sure how well that would work, plus having the biological component on the outside would make it all the easier to remove in battle.
Animal skins? The latent chakra networks might cause unpredictable changes and fluctuations unless I took the time to arrange them individually.
Problem is I really don't want something water soluble or flammable, even if I stuck hairs deep inside the clay they would likely be broken down and destroyed if the puppet were exposed to a fireball.
Well, I guess there's nothing for it, I'll have to do without. It'll just be slightly more difficult to maneuver them.
I've got flame throwers installed in the arms of the puppets, now that I don't have the wooden exterior I don't have to worry about heat conductivity.
Hidden weapons can't really be used to the same extent, ceramics aren't quite as forgiving in regards to tiny slats and concealed mechanisms. Even with the internals reinforced with metal the chances of some hidden opening chipping are really high.
Date: Six months thirteen days after awakening
Subject: Moving into position
What's that process birds and fish use to reduce resistance? Tailgating! Right. Even with tailgating under the ocean floor it still took like three hours to get them all in position.
Tricky bit was figuring out how to match up the exact location above ground with where I knew they were underground. Since puppets can only see their surroundings subjectively it's really hard to coordinate together with the avian scout puppets when they can't see the same environment.
Date: Six months fourteen days after awakening
Subject: Trap set
Konoha squad coming through. Don't recognize any of the faces, must not be very famous. Chunin though, so I can't afford to underestimate them. Must be wary for plot armor.
Date: Six months fourteen days after awakening
Subject: After action report
Started by dragging the one at the rear under the ground. Subterranean fights generally rely on who can hold their breath the longest, and puppets don't breathe. Wouldn't work like that for a skilled Earth user though.
The other two responded by jumping into the trees, not something I have a strong counter for at this point.
Attacking with ranged bombardment from multiple directions didn't have any noticeable effect, they managed to deflect consistently.
The one the northern side closed to engage, the other one cast a wide area affect genjutsu. Probably didn't realize that they were being attacked by puppets, unfortunate since the genjutsu actually worked.
Had to cut off awareness of those puppets and submerge them under the ground. Back ups were sent in in the form of rodents and birds, using the same kawarimi tactic I used in my first engagement in Claw. The rapid switching had a noticeable effect on the close range fighter, very distracting but not very damaging.
After the few seconds it took to purge the genjutsu from the puppets they reemerged. Trying flamethrowers against the genjutsu user seemed largely effective, disrupting any further attempts at casting illusions. At that point I had one puppet switch out with a diving bird puppet and drag the genjutsu user under the ground.
The final fight with the taijutsu user was just a slog. He couldn't damage my puppets faster than they could damage him.
Would have been considerably easier if I started lacing my blades with drugs.
Date: Six months fifteen days after awakening
Subject: Capture results
Looks like it was a standard Nin-Gen-Tai squad, well rounded but not exceptional. The ninjutsu user turned out to be a kunoichi from the Sarutobi clan, had a couple of decent fire jutsu and Fire transformation training skills, but she was really pretty low down on the internal clan hierarchy.
The other two were clanless. One a civilian born, son of a baker, the other an orphan. The orphan was trying to seduce his Sarutobi teammate in an attempt at gaining clan backing. How adorably twisted in his affections.
Orphan-boy was the taijutsu user, he relied a lot on body reinforcement, kind of similar in style to a knock off goken. Might be useful. I did like the skills at deflecting incoming projectiles, he must have trained that a lot, very nice.
The baker's son was the genjutsu user, apparently his parents didn't want him being a close ranged attacker, trying to minimize his risks in combat and pushed him into the ranged support option.
Anyway, got the Phoenix Sage and Great Flame techniques from the Sarutobi girl, the latter was their clan exclusive jutsu. Kind of a pain though, Fire release is just so meh. It's neither more effective nor as cheap as the flame throwers I already have. Plus the jutsu are all so similar, they just burn shit, no supplemental or defensive ones at all.
Nabbed the False Surroundings and Hell Viewing genjutsu from the other guy. Sweet! I like those. My thinking on genjutsu is basically just that the more prescribed the result and second less real it seems the more useless it will be. A lot of the higher ranked genjutsu have very specific outcomes and look completely surreal, it's obvious in the extreme that the person isn't viewing reality and then they just have to figure out how to escape.
However, for these two genjutsu it's not like that. The False Surroundings technique is designed to just slightly change the environment, while the Hell Viewing technique causes the mind to invent its own worst fear and see it as real.
Plus, I have an advantage for genjutsu in that I can already separate out pure yin chakra, just like the current Mizukage, which makes it much harder to detect and dispel. I can see a lot of possible uses for those two genjutsu used in conjunction.
And, if I can twist the Hell Viewing technique around to also see what they want most, then I'd have a ninja corollary for both Boggarts and the Mirror of Erised, pretty effective ways of hashing out a quick and dirty personality evaluation.
Date: Six months seventeen days after awakening
Subject: Scouting
Both the enemy camps have taken to only giving out order as they send people out, then have them plan while en-route. Unfortunately this doesn't give me a lot of time to figure out their plans and react to them.
Longer missions are easier to interfere with though. A Kiri team is heading over the ocean to Moon Kingdom, which seems to be a relay station of theirs. I can just set up a trap for them in between, but I'll only be able to hit them on their way back, since they've already left and are too far away to catch up to.
Date: Six months twenty one days after awakening
Subject: Here they come
Team incoming. Escort mission? That wasn't on their orders. Either that or that person is a new transfer.
The plan stays as is. If some escape then it's still fine.
Date: Six months twenty one days after awakening
Subject: After action report
Used the False Surroundings area affect genjutsu to hide my puppets. Basically just made them look like rocks and mounds of mud on the sea floor.
This turned out to be a good thing as those with a strong Water release can sense the flow of water they are in contact with by infiltrating part of their chakra into it.
Once I have some sort of chakra sensing ability I'll have to practice on ensuring that I can use genjutsu to fool it.
When the Kiri nin passed onto the beach some of my puppets came up from out of the water and attacked with flame throwers. That was a mistake in hindsight, the flames across the low water level of the beach gave them too much steam to play with.
Still, it was partly alright, given that the puppets left underground still managed to attack them from below. Not so good was that they immediately rose the water table, turned the area to mud and then used their combined chakra to overpower my control over the Earth technique.
I wasn't even aware that was possible.
…Or, well, chakra magic, anything's possible, but I wasn't aware it was something I had to watch out for.
I got a few of them out of the situation by using shunshin, but most of those puppets got dragged down and broken by high pressure mud.
I managed to incapacitate one of the chunin with a drugged kunai and abscond with him. It was only after that that the guy they were escorting came into play.
He smiled.
His teeth were fully serrated.
Sure I got some decent taijutsu from before, but against someone like that… Yeah, my puppets got sliced to ribbons and smashed to pieces. Ceramics might be good against Fire and Water, but they're shit against decent weapons skills.
Date: Six months twenty two days after awakening
Subject: Kiri chunin
Kenjutsu user primarily. Dreamt of joining the Seven Swordsmen as a child, didn't have the gumption to pull it off. Admired the guy they were escorting, who is named Fujisaki Akira, because he was accepted as a potential heir for the Kiba.
Don't recognize the name, might mean he died in canon, might mean he was just never mentioned. The Kiba swords are supposed to be insanely sharp, which would help explain why he was able to cut through my puppets like that, but even if that wasn't the case I doubt I would have been able to defeat him on open ground.
I… wouldn't really call what this chunin used 'swordsmanship', more like 'magical sword arts', he focused a lot more on figuring out how to use chakra flow on his blade and use it together with Silent Killing than he did learning correct forms.
That seems to be a common problem, people focus too much on flashy jutsu and too little on fundamentals. No wonder the Samurai are a legitimate threat when they just focus on one or two chakra techniques as supplemental to their actual sword styles.
I imagine that the actual Seven Swordsmen and their apprentices are probably outliers though. The one I saw certainly seems like he was.
Oh! Silent Killing, not a jutsu. Just learning how to move very silently while not releasing any killing intent. Hmm, killing intent is something I'll have to look into, it might make sense under certain conditions.
Can't really fully exploit the Silent Killing skills without both practice and specially modifying the joints of my puppets. The lack of breathing and need for clothing makes it easier though, so I might start with that and work from there.
For a Fist Full of Omake
- Location
- US
Omake – The other guys
"Surrender, I've got your surrounded"
"What's the point. I wanted to make this a better world, but how can I when any little action might butterfly away the births of the very characters this world needs to see it through?"
"Umm. Are you from Earth?"
"You too huh? Hey remember that time when the bug alien enslaved all of Portugal and made them eat only rice and pork rinds? Crazy."
"Yeah… I think I remember that."
"I can't take it anymore! If I fight in this war I might stop Menma from ever existing, and then this whole world will be doomed. All because I had to stroke my own ego. It's too much pressure man, too many lives."
"Just chill. Souls exist, reincarnation is real, ergo lives don't matter."
"Raseringu!" *poof/splat*
"Oh my god! You're a medic, you have to help him."
"I'm a medic, not a god, even I can't heal having his face blown off."
Omake – A different kind of rationalization for a different kind of story
Kurama Yakumo was very nervous. Why was she nervous? Because she was meeting Ido for the first time.
"Why have you done this?"
"Why? Why indeed. It's quite simple really. Villainous monologue."
"Huh?"
"Oh, sorry, I just really don't care about explaining myself. But since you're about to be sealed into the background forever I might as well."
"…"
"Ahem. Have you ever wondered how your bloodline limit can be possible? How it can break and warp the very fabric of reality, bend mother nature over and spank her on the ass?"
"No?"
"And that is why you fail! It's only the Ido, the Inserts, that can see reality for what it really is. A dream."
"A dream, so this is going to be one of those conversations."
"You blind fool. What do you think chakra is but the manifestation of man's need to control the world around them, bloodlines are their need to be special, the bijuu are their fear of unforeseeable change, the clans and villages are their need for social unity, the shinobi existence their natural competition for dominance and resources. This is a subjective reality, a dream shaped by its participants. That is why it lacks any sort of underlying rational mechanic and that is why we Ido can shape it at will!"
"So… you're saying you're a god?"
"Yes. If a girl asks you if you're a god the answer is always yes."
"Oh. No wonder you're supposed to be the manifestation of the Ego."
"No, I'm supposed to be the manifestation of the Id, it's just that even that's bullshit since we're separate people."
"Surrender, I've got your surrounded"
"What's the point. I wanted to make this a better world, but how can I when any little action might butterfly away the births of the very characters this world needs to see it through?"
"Umm. Are you from Earth?"
"You too huh? Hey remember that time when the bug alien enslaved all of Portugal and made them eat only rice and pork rinds? Crazy."
"Yeah… I think I remember that."
"I can't take it anymore! If I fight in this war I might stop Menma from ever existing, and then this whole world will be doomed. All because I had to stroke my own ego. It's too much pressure man, too many lives."
"Just chill. Souls exist, reincarnation is real, ergo lives don't matter."
"Raseringu!" *poof/splat*
"Oh my god! You're a medic, you have to help him."
"I'm a medic, not a god, even I can't heal having his face blown off."
Omake – A different kind of rationalization for a different kind of story
Kurama Yakumo was very nervous. Why was she nervous? Because she was meeting Ido for the first time.
"Why have you done this?"
"Why? Why indeed. It's quite simple really. Villainous monologue."
"Huh?"
"Oh, sorry, I just really don't care about explaining myself. But since you're about to be sealed into the background forever I might as well."
"…"
"Ahem. Have you ever wondered how your bloodline limit can be possible? How it can break and warp the very fabric of reality, bend mother nature over and spank her on the ass?"
"No?"
"And that is why you fail! It's only the Ido, the Inserts, that can see reality for what it really is. A dream."
"A dream, so this is going to be one of those conversations."
"You blind fool. What do you think chakra is but the manifestation of man's need to control the world around them, bloodlines are their need to be special, the bijuu are their fear of unforeseeable change, the clans and villages are their need for social unity, the shinobi existence their natural competition for dominance and resources. This is a subjective reality, a dream shaped by its participants. That is why it lacks any sort of underlying rational mechanic and that is why we Ido can shape it at will!"
"So… you're saying you're a god?"
"Yes. If a girl asks you if you're a god the answer is always yes."
"Oh. No wonder you're supposed to be the manifestation of the Ego."
"No, I'm supposed to be the manifestation of the Id, it's just that even that's bullshit since we're separate people."