Interlude (AU): Marked for Mechanics
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Interlude (AU): Marked for Mechanics
If, perhaps, Hazō got a different sealing failure in Chapter 560, Part 2…
After minutes of meditation, Hazō opened his eyes. His chakra was as smooth as could be, perfectly under his control. With his gaze soft, his mind still half-present in that world beyond where seals made sense, he extended his hand to the blank and infused.
And, once again, his Sage-damned handwriting got the better of him. His chakra flowed out of the blank through a pair of strokes that were supposed to be parallel and were instead a hair off, and while he tried to abort the infusion, it was too late.
Hazō substituted away and bunkered behind a pair of Multiple Earth Walls while he waited for the sealing failure monstrosity to come out and eat him. After a minute of waiting, he peeked his head out at the clearing where he'd infused.
The blank was there on the small stone pedestal, burnt out but otherwise unharmed. There was no visual indication of any sealing failure that had happened.
Hazō waited attentively for any sign of the failure. Were there unusual sensations in his body or his chakra? No, there were none.
Could he hear an oscillating high-pitched ringing? A ominous low thrum? Voices coming from behind him slightly too quiet to make out what they're saying? No, he just heard the peaceful sound of the day's gentle breeze through the trees surrounding Leaf.
Maybe the sealing failure was a dud, then. He might not even need to tell Kagome-sensei, honestly. His ears were finally recovering from the last lupchanzen check, and he really didn't want another.
Still, he did need to take more care with his infusions and work on his calligraphy to prevent such failures. He wouldn't always be so lucky. He brainstormed potential solutions as he packed up the sealing facility and headed back into Leaf.
o-o-o
When Hazō got back to the Gōketsu compound on the outskirts of Leaf, he felt that things were wrong. Well, he couldn't see anything wrong, but there was an unmistakable tension in the air.
Jin was manning the entryway to the main house and stared at Hazō a little more aggressively than usual. Kagome and Kazushi were bent over a table analyzing something on a sheet of paper, but it didn't have the air of their rapid-fire discussions about seal theory. It felt more serious.
Hazō carried onwards into the family sitting room, only to catch a snippet of conversation – Yuno asking Noburi something about underwater basket weaving? That didn't make sense, Yuno was the expert in that field.
Hazō entered the room, and Noburi was instantly on his feet.
"Hazō, what's the meaning of this?"
"Of what?"
"Of this!" Noburi waved his hand around his face expressively, as if gesturing to something. Hazō looked around the room, then inspected Noburi closely. "I don't see anything off."
"You don't?" Noburi asked. "Yuno sees it too. So does Kagome and Kazushi and Jin and Haru, and I assume the rest of our ninja, maybe the rest of Leaf, and maybe the civilians too! Did you cause a sealing failure that's messing with our vision?"
Hazō felt his heart sinking. Maybe the sealing failure wasn't a dud. Maybe it was striking at what mattered most.
"I did cause a sealing failure, yes," Hazō said quickly. "I don't see anything wrong. Everything looks normal to me. Can you describe in detail what you're seeing? Figuring it out is the first step to fixing it."
"Well, I don't really know how to describe it," Noburi said with a frown. "It's like a little brick in the corner of my vision, except it has rounded edges. It has a little green square inside it, on the left, and that green square has a white cross on top of it. The white cross isn't centered on the green square – it's shifted up and left. Then, there's some words on it. It says: 'FtD: Gōketsu Noburi'. Which is my name, if you ignore the weird characters at the start."
Hazō blinked.
"Mine looks the same," Yuno said. "Except it has my name instead. 'FtD: Gōketsu Yuno'. But, like Noburi and I were talking about…"
"Well, if I focus really hard on this thing, it… unfolds? It does something my brain can't quite handle, then it's taking up my whole vision. It's mostly white, with these gray lines running up and down and left and right dividing everything up into rectangles, but some of the rectangles are colored in with grays and greens. There's my name again, then it says Male. But after that, it gets really weird. It says 'Unspent XP', then 'Unspent Pangolin XP', then 'Unspent Yamanaka XP', then… Hazō! Why is there a Yamanaka in my mind?"
Hazō didn't answer.
"Hazō? Hazō! What did you do to us?"
"Sorry, Noburi," Hazō said, raising his hands. "It's a lot to take in. I think I made a mistake. I can see that stuff too."
"You can?" Noburi asked. "Then why did I need to describe it all to you?"
"Well, I've always been able to see my own character sheet. At least, I think I have. I don't actually remember before the Swamp too well, but I must have had it even before then."
"Your 'character sheet'? Like a character in an RPG?"
"Yeah," Hazō said. "And now you can see yours too, I guess."
"What does that mean?" Noburi asked. "Are we characters in an RPG?"
"No, we're real," Hazō said. "It's just… well, the RPGs are a lot like real life in many ways, right? This is one of them. The difference is that the mechanics of real life are different than those of RPGs."
"How do you know all about this?" Noburi asked.
Hazō shrugged. "I don't know. I've always been able to see my character sheet, then sometimes I just… get it? I can't explain it better than that, but I can kind of see how everything fits together."
Now probably wasn't the time to tell Noburi that the 'mechanics' of reality weren't actually stable, and that they were constantly changing, adding and removing rules seemingly at random. If at all, that had been what had convinced Hazō that he was real, and not an RPG character. An RPG's rules didn't change, since they were written out in a rulebook, while reality… well, sealmasters had a habit of taking chunks out of reality. In any real world, the rules of reality would necessarily be constantly shifting.
"Okay," Noburi said. "That's a lot to take in. At least I'm not going crazy, I guess? Or at least, not going any crazier than you, which now that I say it doesn't mean much. Sage's balls, does this mean I'm going to be as Hazō-stupid as you now?"
"Hazō-stupid?"
"You know, like smart-stupid. Stupid-smart? Whatever's going on inside your head that makes you figure out a new weapon of mass destruction every other week, and also gives you the guts to propose extorting the Hokage with death-by-S-rank to a different S-rank ninja in the village."
"Fair," Hazō said. "And I don't think so. I mean, it doesn't change anything about you, right? It just gives you a bit more control about how you train, if you want."
"Well, you have a lot of explaining to do," Noburi said.
Hazō sighed. "Yeah, I know. If everyone can see it, I figure I ought to gather everyone up and just give the explanation one time instead of needing to give it over and over."
"You should do that," Noburi said. "Sooner than later. I heard Mari getting angry about Intimidation 40, whatever that means. I think she said that she should be 'way scarier than that'."
Hazō winced. "Okay, so apparently we're going to need to talk about pyramids too. Great."
"Pyramids?" Yuno asked.
"So, when you have skills of a certain level… actually, I'll explain it once everyone is here. Come on, help me gather everyone up."
o-o-o
"Okay, so… where to begin? Everyone has a bunch of skills. You should be able to see that in the left column. Each skill has a level, which represents how good you are at that skill, and-."
"I will raise a trivial objection," Kei said, raising her hand. "Skills are neither discrete nor finite. Being skilled at certain tasks affects performance on other tasks, so they cannot be cleanly separated in this way. Similarly, there are far too many potential tasks a ninja can do to enumerate. A list of… twenty-five skills is wholly incapable of capturing the diversity of human capabilities."
"Yeah, so there are important exceptions," Hazō said. "Ninjutsu, for example, are easier to learn if you know other ninjutsu, since you get some skills that carry over – so that should answer the discrete question. As to the finite one – you're right, but we can save that for later. As it turns out, we all have infinity skills at level zero. We should shelve that for now though."
"Level 'zero' does not make sense for most of these potential tasks, though," Kei replied. "I would not have zero skill at many endeavors inadequately represented on this sheet. For instance, I see no skill for debate, yet I would expect my long years of pedantry to provide a substantial advantage in that regard."
"That might actually be represented by Rapport or something, and also level 'zero' doesn't mean bad, it just means that you haven't specifically trained it, but really, we should shelve it for now while we focus on the basics. Okay, so each skill has a level – that's the number next to the skill. That represents how good you are at it. Very roughly, for ninja skills, genin have levels between 20 and 40, chūnin are between 40 and 60, and jōnin are between 60 and 80." Hazō heard Akane's charcoal scratching away in her notepad. "I'm not sure what's going on with S-rankers, but maybe they have skills above 80, or if they're just basically jōnin stats with really good jutsu."
"Well, I have a skill above 80," Mari said casually. "And I know I'm pretty awesome, but it still suggests that they can't be that rare."
"You do?" Hazō asked. "Which one!?"
"Why should I tell you?" Mari asked. "What I wanted to ask was: I have Intimidation 40. Does that mean I'm only as scary as a brand-new chūnin? If you say yes, I'm going to call bullshit and walk out, by the way, since I should be way scarier than some snot-nosed kid that got a promotion for punching goats particularly well. No offense to any goat-punchers."
Yūma shrugged. "I use a spear. With Melee Weapons 54 apparently. Wonder if that means I should try learning how to use a sword?"
"You'd pick it up pretty fast," Hazō said. "To answer your question, Mari – yes, you're scarier than a new chūnin. Your base level is lower than a social-spec chūnin who specifically focuses on scaring the shit out of people, but you probably have abilities that boost your effective level way above what any chūnin can do with raw stats."
"You're right," Mari said. "The 'effective' level of Intimidation is in the 50s. Is that one of the bonuses?"
"Oh, that might be your Thousand Yard Stare!" Hazō said.
"'Thousand Yard Stare'?" Mari asked.
"Yeah, it's a, uh, measure of how traumatized you are," Hazō said. "Sorry."
"Right, of course. Glad to know that objective reality is affirming that I'm fucked in the head," Mari said.
"To be fair, probably most jōnin are?" Hazō said. "I've had my brain put through a psychic blender from downloading the Pangolin Scroll and the Great Seal, so I'm probably up there with you at 11, but Kei's only got 7 and Noburi's at 5."
"I knew I was the most well-adjusted member of this family," Noburi said.
"Pardon the foolish question," Kei said. "But Hazō, how are you able to tell what 'Thousand Yard Stare' score I have?"
"Oh, uh… I can see your character sheet."
"That…" Kei paused for a moment. "Intuitively, I am aware that it is an inexplicable grid of numbers produced by a sealing failure. Nonetheless, if this is indeed an inviolable piece of universal substrate making up a part of my existence, your ability to see it without my consent feels remarkably intrusive."
"Well, you did consent, kind of," Hazō said. "When you let me supervise your training."
"I hardly expect that this constitutes an agreement to grant you access to the deepest facets of my being."
"Well, the main thing I can do with it is spend your XP, so it doesn't let me do anything that bad to you – and spending XP still requires that you follow my training suggestions. Really, I can only look. Anything that actually happens is still in your control. Mostly."
"Mostly?"
"Well, sometimes there's inexplicable stuff that happens. XP randomly appearing for no good reason. It's inexplicable, so I can't actually tell you why it happens or how to get control over it."
Kei opened her mouth, then closed it and leaned back into the couch, looking ill.
"Can you explain what XP is?" Akane asked, looking up from her notepad.
"Right, of course!" Hazō said. "So, if you want to level-up a skill, you need to pay XP equal to the skill's new level. So, if you have Taijutsu 30 and you want to level it up to Taijutsu 31, you'd need to pay 31 XP. If you wanted to level up to Taijutsu 32, you'd need to spend 31 plus 32 XP, for 63 XP total."
"That doesn't make sense," Haru said. "No one except apparently you has ever gotten better at Taijutsu by moving numbers around in their head. We go to the training ground and practice new forms, spar, do drills, all that shit."
"Right, I do that too," Hazō said. "But I only get better at Taijutsu when I spend XP on it."
"And you do this… how?" Akane asked.
"I just formulate a really firm intention, I guess."
"Hang on, we skipped over something really important. Hazō, you can see my character sheet? And move around XP on it?" Noburi asked.
Hazō nodded.
"Then you should let me see yours!"
For the first time ever, that button in Hazō's vision expanded. A message written in white text appeared beneath it.
Share with Gōketsu Noburi?
[Yes] || [No]
[Yes] || [No]
Hazō considered for a moment, then focused on the [Yes] button. A moment later, Noburi blinked, and his eyes flicked around.
"Hang on," Noburi said. "Hang on just one second, Hazō. You're supposed to be the training expert, right?"
"I'd say I'm pretty comfortable with how this works."
"Then how come you have Alertness 33? Didn't you say that was genin-level?"
Hazō frowned. "Well, technically yes, but I have chakdar-"
"And you have Athletics 37. Is that another genin-level stat I see?"
"Well, it's effectively 40, thanks to the bonus from the Iron Nerve," Hazō said, and he saw Haru's expression sour out of the corner of his eyes. "But like I said, it's not just about the base stat-"
"Hazō, when did you last put XP into combat stats?" Noburi asked incredulously.
"In the Chūnin Exams two years ago," Hazō said through gritted teeth. "But I didn't share this with you expecting you to explain it in detail to everybody, Noburi."
"And no wonder you failed that seal infusion. Look at this Hazō! Craftsmanship (Calligraphy) 29, but Sealing 64!"
"What the fuck is Craftsmanship (Calligraphy)?" Haru asked. "How did you just say parentheses with your mouth?"
"I also have a skill like that," Yuno said. "I have Craftsmanship (Basket Weaving (Underwater)) 10. Who names these skills?"
"You said the ninjutsu have carryover between them? Why not Craftsmanship, since they all share the same name?" Haru asked.
"Yeah, also, what's going on with ninjutsu?" Noburi asked. "How come some of mine say 'Suiton', and others don't?"
"One question at a time, please," Hazō said, raising his hands.
"Is it… good if my Thousand Yard Stare is below 11? Didn't you say it's a good thing somehow?"
"What's a Fate Point?"
"How come Technique Hacking is in my head? I never learned to modify ninjutsu."
"Why is there no XP spent on Clone or Dispel? I spent weeks learning those in the Academy!"
"Can you explain Max Level for Discount Purposes?"
"I think I got it! Look, I did the math. I think I can get Taijutsu 80 for less than 3,000 XP!"
"Hang on, Kei's Athletics and Alertness are both better than mine – is she a better ninja than me!?"
"Why are the Yamanaka showing up inside my head?"
The questions didn't stop until the Tower messenger arrived for Hazō, so that he could brief Asuma on his latest and greatest mistake. Hazō took the interruption gratefully, since it meant that Leaf had managed not to dissolve into chaos under the sealing failure's effects.
Hazō only hoped that he didn't come back to a clan compound of rubble and ash.
o-o-o
"Well, Akane, I can actually discuss this with you in a way that makes sense now. For your next batch of training, I was thinking that you could level Elemental Mastery to level 40."
"Huh, that's an… interesting idea, Hazō. Why would I do that?"
"I just have a good feeling about it. Elemental Mastery is such a unique technique, and I want to push it to its limits. It feels like the sort of thing that could yield some sort of weaponizable application."
"It's already pretty weaponizable, don't you think? It's a nice area-denial technique in a pinch. Even if it matured into an offensive technique, I wouldn't want to cook people alive with a secondary ninjutsu when I could play to my strengths as a taijutsu specialist instead."
"I was thinking more freezing people alive, like those stories about the Yuki clan."
"Still, getting even a powerful offensive ninjutsu isn't what I need right now. In particular, Elemental Mastery 40 would be what, 610 XP? That's enough for… hang on Hazō, let me get a charcoal."
scribble scribble
"That's enough for Taijutsu 59 and Athletics 56. 4 points of Taijutsu, and 6 points of Athletics – that's a lot, isn't it? I'm still doing missions, and those extra points of Athletics and Taijutsu could maybe provide a valuable safety buffer. Why can't I raise Elemental Mastery more gradually?"
"...yeah, that's sensible. Sorry Akane, I think I let my excitement get the better of me. Also, wow. You've learned the mechanics really quickly."
"What can I say? It's a lot like an extra-complicated board game, and I guess my knack for that carried over."
"Fair enough. Speaking of which, with the sealing failure throwing off my research schedule, I think I actually will be able to make the game night with Ino tomorrow."
"Amazing! Actually, will it be weird seeing her with the failure's effects? What if she wants us to share our sheets with her…?"
"That sounds like a problem for tomorrow-me. I'm sure he'll be great at solving problems. Good night, dear."
"Good night."
Voting is open.
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