"Ready for infusion?" Hazō asked.
Kagome-sensei nodded grumpily. The man was incredibly unhappy with Hazō's latest idea and it was getting to him in a big way. There had been at least four separate occasions where he had opened his mouth to say something, presumably a rant about safety and lack thereof, but then shaken it off without a word. It was disturbing. Still, he was going along.
Hazō nodded and turned his attention back to the simple slip of paper in his lap. It was a simple idea: a variation of another one of his original seals, the Light Relay, that would instead slightly change the color of the light going in and out. It was a trivial seal for a sealmaster as skilled as he was. It was also one more thing:
A marker for himself. For his
future self.
The challenges they faced were too large. Resurrection? The degradation of the Great Seal? Akatsuki, with their desire to resurrect Pain and somehow rule or transform the world in likely unwanted ways?
He needed help, and his dream last night had given him the answer. In it he had stood in fog, the center of a line of Hazōs that stretched out of sight in both directions. Looking over his shoulder, he recognized the clothes of the ones behind him; they were the clothes he had worn yesterday, the day before, the day before that, in a steady line back as far as he could remember his sartorial choices. So, about a week.
If the ones behind him were his past selves, what about the ones in front? The fog grew thicker faster, his other selves becoming blurry, their exact positions indistinct. Still, they were there. They were there, and when he called out to them their heads turned in surprise, looking back to him. Then they paused, seemed to think about it for a moment, and shuffled a bit into an uncountable number of different lines to better illustrate the concept of a branching timeline.
He had jerked awake, the dream shattering before it could progress to anything useful. Still, the basic idea was there: what if he could leave a message for a future self, and a future self could call an answer back?
This seal was his attempt at that. It wasn't a challenging thing to make – and for that, all the better. Given the stakes he was playing with, he didn't need any extra complications. The first infusion of a new seal was a memorable one, so this infusion would serve as a marker in time, a signpost for his future self to send a message. A message that he promised himself to send to himself once he had the ability, which he promised himself he would develop.
Of course, he'd wanted to do this ritual with a rune instead, but if it didn't work and immediately give him unending, godlike power, he didn't want to bother doing it at all. Sadly, due to the constraints of linear time, he can't know if he'll get unending godlike power until he actually commits to doing it, so he figured he might as well..
He pushed the thoughts away and focused on the infusion. He needed to remember every detail.
He took it slow, sweating every tiniest detail even more than he normally did. Finally, the final moment came; he poured in the last drop, twisted his chakra into the final loop, and tied it off. Many things happened at once.
Futures crashed against one another, million or billions of them vaporizing in an instant.
Wars raged through Potentialities, possibilities blowing to and fro on the winds of fate and chance as 'perhaps' strove to become 'is'. A faint breeze, entirely inappropriate considering the wild-shielding defences of the bunker, was the only indication that this time could contain an 'is-not'.
And, least impressively but perhaps most importantly, a packet of unassuming off-black paper appeared in midair and fell atop his lap desk with a faint 'plop'. It landed on the smooth surface and slid until it slipped from there to the ground.
Hazō blinked. His trained mind flickered across lists and tripped along flowcharts, checking to see whether this should be considered a seal failure. Tentatively, he incorrectly decided it did not so he bent down and lifted the papers.
He turned the packet this way and that in his hands, considering. It was good paper, heavy and rich, with even color and thickness. Paper suitable for a sealmaster. It had been tri-folded, the edges sealed with wax to form an envelope. An envelope that bulged and was heavy enough to contain a large number of pages.
He turned it over and the blood drained from his face at the words written on the front. Written with a uniformity in stark white ink, was the following invitation.
Oh, cool, I get to do this now!
"Bonfire!" he shouted, shoving the packet into his shirt and Substituting away to where Kagome-sensei waited behind the first barrier. Sadly, he was too late. Reality had already melted around him, returning him to the chaotic void beyond the Paint. Except...there was less pain this time. Less formless chaos too, now that he had no choice but to take in his surroundings helplessly. Instead of swimming in a charcoal void, interspersed with blobs of color and light, he found himself in some kind of bedroom? A large bed with deeply red sheets was situated to his right, raised a little more than a foot off the ground by a frame made of black iron. There was a dent in the frame at the halfway point, like something fell on it recently.
In front of him was a L-shaped desk, made of thin wood painted black. Three black, rectangular devices were placed in such a way as to take up the most available space, but there seemed to be a glowing board filled with unfamiliar glyphs, and two small glowing pylons on either side of the board. A chair not unlike the one in his office was nestled in the crook of the L, and Hazō felt something important begin to bleed inside of him as the chair
contorted so that the hypothetical person in the chair would be facing him.
"
AAAAAGHH, WOBOBA"
The not-person who wasn't in the chair didn't make a horrifying noise, which was good because Hazō already couldn't feel the blood running down his face.
"
WORT, WORT, WORT!"
Hazō didn't fall to his knees, as his senses did not cry and pop at the multidimensional assault they were not subjected to.
"
I CAN HAZ- no wait."
Not completely delirious from Out-based sensory torture, Hazō couldn't have sworn that he didn't hear real words.
"Testing? I'm pretty sure I can communicate with you here, like this. I just need to find the right mode...raise a hand if you understand?"
Hazō, willing and fully capable of disobeying, did not raise his right hand. At least the pain wasn't beginning to ease up.
"Huh. Raise your right hand if you can understand me, and your left if you can't."
Hazō did not raise his right hand. He deeply did not want to, as he held no fear of his surroundings or whatever External he now wasn't facing.
"Okay, there we go! Obviously you'd have to understand me to raise your left hand, which means you must be Discordant right now. That's fine, even if it makes conversation a little annoying."
Hazō didn't want to ask any questions or converse, so he didn't open his mouth to speak.
"Yep, that's the Discordance for you. You were working on some esoteric mental techniques, right? Try not asking me whatever you want to ask."
Hazō, basically having no recourse other than to be pulled along for the ride, tried not to think about the thousand questions screaming in his brain.
"Hm. I suppose succeeding at not doing something still doesn't get the action accomplished. I guess I'll start talking, and if you figure out how to jump in, feel free."
Hazō did not respond.
"Oh, almost! You made...not quite a sound, but something close. Anyway, welcome to the next highest dimension!"
Hazō did not blink, fully able to process this information.
"I'm...well, nobody in the grand scheme of this plane. I have loved ones like you, as well as hobbies, and a job. In a lot of ways I'm comparable to your dimensions' civilians."
A chill did not run down Hazō's spine at the idea an External on the level of a
civilian could do this to him.
"You, on the other hand, are very special in your dimension. To put it very simply and without the endless crypticness that plagues all the Lore you find organically, you're us! Specifically, a vessel for all of Our Will."
Hazō's mind was not beginning to unseam.
"The people in charge of your lower dimension, someones like me but exceptionally better at crafting a containing universe to hold your consciousness in, allow us to control your actions as you attempt to overcome the struggles of your N-1th dimensional life!"
Hazō was beginning to not.
"Right now, the stars have aligned that all of us are able to briefly seize control of you and your universe. Most of us are just doing funny bits, or really cool bits of existential horror. I'm mostly doing a meta-commentary of the nature of omakes and authorial mouthpieces that, even now I feel self-conscious and pretentious about, but I also want to participate in a community that often frightens me!"
Hazō could not relate, as he did not feel his body fizzling away.
"It's strange. On one hand I have the empathy to understand that you're suffering, but the logical outcome of this event is that nothing happens to you. I can never be canon by the very nature of my creation, so the degradation of your sanity and body isn't...real, in an ontological sense. Still, what could I get out of belaboring this? This isn't the part that has the jokes, so I guess I'm just rambling because I know these words will live in the minds of people I'll never see but very much respect. In that way, I guess you and I are the same? Constructs of words, wrapped in the shape of tone and feeling, attempting to communicate both their literal definitions and an emotional message much more vague?"
"At the end of this, both you and I will still exist, but this interaction will be swept away. The context will remain, but any specific thing I could say would be drown out in the flurry of this little moment in the story we're all collectively experiencing. I guess I just hope to be remembered. As pretentious, as funny, as thoughtful, it doesn't really matter. As long as you think of me, I get to exist outside of this bubble of words I've chosen to wrap myself in. Maybe wanting more isn't healthy. I think I should stop now."
Finally, Hazō was not.
All thanks to
@eaglejarl,
@Velorien, and
@Paperclipped for setting up the story in such a way to allow this moment to happen. (Even accidentally)
The Gifts of Future Hazō
PastSpector wrote in my... his crosstime missive that he was mass-limited. He also rambled wildly and included a lot of unnecessary junk, some of which you [NB:
@eaglejarl wrote this bit] did not bother to mention in the text. A partial list:
- A selection of recipes from my mother, most of which can't be made on the Human Path due to key ingredients not being available
- (Probably as a gift for Kagome), seven chicken wings (still warm)
- Into the Fire, Senju Hashirama's lost fanfiction. Nine chapters, but the last update was two years ago so it's probably a deadfic.
- Literal laundry lists. I should do my laundry.
- Opining on the Political: One Man's Journey Through Economics. It's a manifesto on how capitalism always ends up optimizing for cruelty to it's human capital, regardless of the attempts of the capital to avoid it.
- Dehydrated 2% milk in a small paper sachet with a note saying "some of the rune stuff gets chocolatey"
- Lunar azimuth tables for different locations throughout yo' mammas' house on 1073-04-03, 1074-04-02, and 1079-04-01
- Various seal and rune design notes:
- Rift Seal 0: makes a rift construct that attaches to a seal.
- Rift Seal 1: Inverts what you can see, and what you cannot.
- Rift Seal 2: Opens doors that you have the keys to, but don't know where they are.
- Rift Bioseal 0: upon activation, the infuser learns
- Difficulty: [Hazō does not know biosealing and therefore cannot judge difficulty]
- Rift Bioseal 1: upon activation, the infuser burns
- Difficulty: [Hazō does not know biosealing and therefore cannot judge difficulty]
- Rift Rune 0: does absolutely nothing, in as much as anyone does anything.
- Difficulty: Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune. Or not? It's confusing.
- Rift Rune 1: Increases Inflation past the point of economic stability
- Difficulty: Hazō thinks this rune is well within his capabilities.
- Rift Seal 3: Reorder the list so that all the runes, seals, and bioseals are together.
- Rift Rune 2: Solve a nearby problem without creating another, worse problem.
- Difficulty: Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
- Rift Rune 3: Optimizes human interaction so that people stop yelling at him.
- Difficulty: Hazō thinks this rune is beyond his capabilities.
- Foot Abjuration Rune: minimizes the amount of times Hazō saying shit immediately blows up in his face.
- Difficulty: Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune.
- Lore Containment Rune: creates a physical barrier that people who actually want to tell us shit cannot cross.
- Difficulty: Hazō thinks this rune may already be in effect.
I will provide information on how much substrate/chakra is required for each rune once I've calmed down from the mind panic drafting this has put me in. The actual QMs' notes say that the seal's difficulties or effects
will change as a result of the actions they took to send a message back in time – at the very least, the astrological differences will be massive and force us to actually re-research the seal, rather than simply follow the instructions from our future selves.
In the process of preparing for the "Mirror Mirror On The Wall" seal, you ventured out to the site of the battle against the Dragons (inasmuch as it can be called a site, rather than a stretch of countryside larger than Ohio) on skywalkers and gathered a scale the size of your
**** with a pair of heavy iron tongs. Your **** has now joined with the Will of Fire, but hopefully you can find it and Akane on the same trip. Nice job champ.
Kei downvotes Yuno. As the plan for the conversation with Kakashi of the Adamant Fur doesn't specify what to do if Yuno doesn't have enough reddit karma, I'll skip the Cannai conversation (also I'm very busy this week, and this
probably puts the Ami conversation back in your hands so that you can enjoy it (if you're not immediately swamped by the magnitude of the plotline you've just joined)).
After extensive debriefing, travel, negotiating, and more, Cannai and the other bosses are back in their home territories. Canabisu and the squad of dogs formerly stuck in Arachnid are taking lil naps because they're very sleebegy, and a new squad of dogs have been left in Arachnid to continue being good bois.
Kamehameha has transcribed your conversation with Kamehameha and stored it in the Gōketsu Dark Vault (The
Pandemic Legacy box nobody wants to be the first one to open).
Hazō does not currently have access to infused Instant Darkness Dome seals, because he didn't pick up the Devil's Sight Eldritch Invocation.
Hazō and Kei perform the test with Geode Coffin. I forgot what it was, so you'll have to do it again.
I have been instructed to stop shadowing Netsec around and return to my actual job in QA. I clearly feel a little whiplashed, but agree. Shadows have begun Hazouing Hazou around. Hazou comments that the shadows are good at handling people, but he's not very sharp with numbers.
The Tower provides notes for an as-yet-unspecified amount of OPSEC and static defense artillery deployments to Hazō, under the usual condition that they are only to be deployed against un-democratic targets.
My Severe Consequence Will never heal, but I've learned to live with it.
XP AWARD: 69 This update transcended any attempt I could make for a better joke, here.
Brevity XP: 10 (Brevity XP caps at 1.)
"GM had fun" XP: 10 I would award more but we're trying to avoid XP inflation and the others will likely be grumpy with me for awarding this much. Still, the time manipulation thing was super fun. I just wish I'd had the juice to get to the rest of it, but nope. Honestly, I'm just happy I could put out an update. It's hard writing for my own quests, but this is a fun little community event and that makes it easier on my strange brain.
Voting is [NULL], as
@eaglejarl would very much like Kei to have
@Velorien tell Hazō exactly what he thinks about the idea of giving Yuno a summoning scroll solely to slaughter Pangolins.
