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. 
