Vote closed
New
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard open voting
Chapter 692: Pre-Mortem
New
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hazō stared down at the scarred body of Gamahebigai in what he felt really should have been shock, but honestly was more of an exhausted nonsurprise. Of course this is how Orochimaru would pass along a message when simpler avenues had been taken from him.
"I'll be back. I want to check on his real body," Noburi said. "C'mon, dude." He placed his hand in Gamahebigai's and both man and toad disappeared back to the Seventh Path.
"Everyone, on me," Hazō said, waving the family in towards the campfire. They gathered around, sober expressions all.
"I'm sorry about this, everyone," Mari said, shaking her head. "This is my fault."
Hazō cocked an eyebrow, waiting for the punchline as he restoked the fire. The day was nippy.
"How is this your fault, Mari?" Yuno asked. "You did not carve those words into the toad. Orochimaru did."
"Yes, but earlier today I..." Mari's voice caught. She hung her head, hair cascading down around her face for a moment, before visibly forcing herself to look up at Yuno. "Earlier today I...I felt bored."
Groans went around the fire.
"Mari, I am very disappointed in you," Snowflake said, shaking her head with mock solemnity. "Very, very disappointed. Have I taught you nothing in all our time together?"
Tenten's head tipped in confusion.
"Did Kei ask you to work on impersonating others as a means of improved social modeling, and that was your effort at impersonating me in one of my more humorous moments?" Mari asked. Her smile said that it wasn't really a question.
Snowflake nodded. "Exactly! What did you think? I'm sure both she and I will appreciate accurate feedback."
"Seven out of ten," Mari said. "Content was spot on and you got the mannerisms." She did the whole headshake-of-regret thing again for demonstration. "I'm keeping one point because you overplayed the head-shake a bit, and you can't get higher than eight out of ten without doing the voice, which would have been inappropriate in these circumstances, so that was pretty much perfect."
Snowflake smiled in delight.
"Ahem," Hazō said. "Evil psycho murderhobo demigod sent us a message, fate of the world, control of the afterlife, all that stuff...?"
"Sigh. Fine, very well. What have you got for us?" Mari asked.
"A little stream of consciousness here," Hazō began. "Bear with me if I don't get things correct on the first go. Offer some patience, listen charitably, all that good stuff."
Kei cut a hand from side to side in a gesture of impatient acknowledgement, which was somewhat ironic in the context.
"Orochimaru fled Leaf," Hazō began. "Probably for the same reason we did—so that he could work on research without being hassled by Akatsuki. He's clearly opposed to them and planning to attack this facility that he says they've set up on the rift site. He wants our help."
"Your help," Mari corrected. "He views the rest of us as background characters at best. No interest in our continued existence unless we have something specifically useful to him. At which point he would prefer to simply take it instead of bargaining." She held up a hand to cut him off. "Yes, he has shown that he's smart enough to realize that bargaining and giving good value in a bargain is useful, but he cares about it only because it's useful to him, not because it's a good principle. If he can simply take something, that's the way to expect he'll act."
Hazō thought about that for a moment. "Okay... I was going to say that I don't think he wants to betray us before the rift assault, but it sounds like maybe you disagree?"
Mari chewed her lip for a moment, her indigo eyes uncertain. "Not sure. You don't have the combat power to participate in the assault yourself, so all he's going to want from you is your runes. Can he steal them?"
Hazō shook his head. "No. Runes and seals are unique to each sealmaster, it's not possible to directly produce someone else's design." Unless you had the Iron Nerve, but that was a distraction. "If I gave him my research notes and detailed instructions, he still couldn't directly create one of my runes. He could use them to create a version of his own that behaves the same way, but he would still have to do the work." A thought struck and he hurried to add, "Unless you meant could he steal my literal runes? The answer is still no. If I actually had a bunch of infused runes he could activate them or deactivate them, same as anyone else. He couldn't infuse my designs and runic drag means that he can't physically walk off with one of my runes."
"In other words, if he thinks you have anything to contribute to the assault then he will need your willing cooperation," Kei said.
"Cooperation," Snowflake corrected. "'Willing' is a very flexible word."
"Thinking about precautions now," Hazō said. "I'm obviously going to meet him. Any reason not to send a Shadow Clone?"
Kagome-sensei snorted. "Obviously you send a Shadow Clone to meet that stinker. Obviously!"
"From a safety perspective, I agree that it's the right move," Hazō said. "I'm trying to think about social impacts, like whether he might be pissed at the gesture of distrust."
"I think it'll be fine," Mari said. "It's complicated, he's unpredictable, I can't be certain of how he'll respond to anything, but the idea doesn't immediately push my 'danger' button so we might as well go for it."
"Your confidence is, as always, a bright light of reassurance," Hazō said. Beside him, Kagome-sensei grumbled. "Is there any reason you think he might betray us?"
Mari shrugged. "He's a runecrafter, you're a runecrafter. The only other runecrafter aside from him. If he kills you, he keeps the discipline to himself."
"And doesn't have to fear you causing a failure," Yuno added.
"Okay, so we're thinking that he probably won't doublecross me before the assault and probably will afterwards?"
The form of everyone's reactions varied from helpless shrug to uncertain faces, but the content was entirely unified: no one had a clue.
"No clue," Mari said. "Still, we have to assume he will and act accordingly. Better to take a precaution you don't need."
"Fair. We'll approach as Shadow Clones. What about splitting the team? I could go meet him, maybe with Noburi and Yuno, while everyone else goes back to Leaf to bring Naruto and Tsunade to the party."
"Why that composition?" Snowflake asked.
"Noburi and Yuno are excellent bodyguards who can keep me safe while I work, and Noburi's chakra transfer is incredibly useful for runecrafting." Plus, it meant that Mari didn't have to look Orochimaru in the eyes again. Given what the Snake Sannin had done to her last time, Hazō wasn't above a bit of chicanery to prevent a repeat performance while concealing the fact that he was protecting her.
"I'm against splitting the party," Mari said. "We're stronger as a team."
"Hazō's suggestion does have the advantage of time-efficiency," Snowflake noted. "Orochimaru will undoubtedly wish to reach out to Leaf for additional manpower before the assault."
"Or at least chakra power," Hazō said. "All our best combat tactics depend on huge amounts of chakra. The Zoo Rush that we used to break the fortress in Rock where the Arachnid Scroll was kept. The Sannin Army that we used to break the Dragons. Manpower or not, we will definitely need a lot of chakra. And Leaf is the best bet for that. Hence why I was thinking we might want to have things organized in advance."
"As a momentary aside, I suggest avoiding the term 'Zoo Rush' in discussion with denizens of the Seventh Path," Snowflake said. "The implications of the term are rather pejorative."
"Noted," Hazō said, refusing to be distracted. "So. Split the party, yea or nay?"
Before anyone could speak, there was a faint puff of smoke and Noburi appeared.
"Hey," Noburi said, sinking to the ground beside his wife. (She promptly took his arm and firmly looped it around herself, still somehow managing to seem diffident and bashful while doing so.) "What did I miss?"
It took a few minutes to catch the family medic up, but as soon as he was, Noburi shook his head.
"No way. We are not splitting the party."
"Why not?" Hazō asked. "It ensures that no single thing catches all of us, it's time-efficient as Snowflake said, it—"
"Simple," Noburi said, running over him. "Because there is nothing definitely and unarguably the right way to go as to staying together or splitting up in this situation. Unless there is a clear and decisive reason to split up, you stay together. Time-efficiency doesn't matter when we don't know what Orochimaru is going to want to do. We could spend a lot of effort and it's wasted, or we could accidentally sabotage something he's planning by spreading the word too fast. Plus, the minute we arrive back in Leaf a timer is counting down to when Akatsuki hears about it and reacts. We don't want to start that timer any sooner than we have to."
"Fair enough. What about setting up some deadman switches?" Hazō asked.
"That sounds...unwise," Snowflake said carefully. "Without knowing the specific nature of your intention, there are a number of potential flaws to the general category of plans."
"I know," Hazō said. "The most obvious being that if one of the deadman switches goes off accidentally, we're screwed."
"Indeed."
"We still need to have something," Hazō said. "Any ideas?"
Silence reigned for a moment before Kei spoke. "You seek an idea the consequences of which would be so awful that Orochimaru would wildly inconvenience or disadvantage himself in order to prevent it from happening, yet the release of which we can closely control."
"Yup. Anything?"
Kei, her inventiveness crippled by her bloodline, looked helplessly at Snowflake. Her clone made a complex facial expression that Hazō mentally translated as 'What? Why is this my problem?! Okay, fine, I know why it's my problem but how is this fair?! Why me?! How am I supposed to pull a miracle idea out of my ear with no time to think? This is so unfair but fine I'll work on it.'
Having been in that situation once or thrice before, he found himself both sympathetic and weirdly filled with schadenfreudic glee.
"For the record," Hazō said, "my first thought, which I am not going with, was to write up treatises on runecrafting and have them widely disseminated if anything bad happens. Then—"
"Are you insane?!" Kagome-sensei shrieked. "You are not publishing the secrets of runecrafting! You would absolutely destroy the world if you did that! People trying to learn from a book—"
"—would definitely end up screwing it up, yes. I know, Sensei, that's why I led with the fact that I'm not going to do it. You taught me better than that." Honestly, it had been a close-run thing, although he wasn't going to admit that to his teacher. Presuming that Orochimaru wanted to be the world's only runecrafter, threatening to broadcast the knowledge would cause him to back down, but the risks simply weren't worth it. Hazō had barely managed to not kill himself while working out the foundations of runecrafting, even though he had been an exceptionally skilled sealmaster with the entirety of the Great Seal stored directly in his bloodline to provide reams of example material. So many times during those early days he had very nearly done a chakra exercise wrong that would have caused a runic failure had he not caught himself in time. Learning to do it from a book, with no human teacher or bloodline-based guidance? He simply didn't think it was possible to do without runic failure. He had yet to see the results of a rune failure but given the power of runic effects in general he was confident that such a failure would be fatal both to the runemaster and everyone for miles around. Potentially even the entire world.
"As I was saying, widely publicizing basic instruction on runecrafting is a no go...but. Suppose we set up a dead man's switch that would inform Akatsuki that Orochimaru was going to attack them?"
"Why would you do that?" Yuno asked. "I thought we wanted him to succeed?"
"We do," Hazō said. "But succeeding against them is probably his number one priority right now. That means it might have enough leverage to constrain his behavior, prevent him from betraying us."
"I dislike the idea," Kei said. "For many reasons. First, it pushes the boundaries so far that it could be seen as insulting as well as threatening. It also is so opposed to your goals that it would reduce the credibility of the idea that you had established the switch in the first place."
"...Okay," Hazō said after a minute. "Let's keep thinking about other options. Noburi, the next time you see them, could you ask the Toad Sages and Gamabunta if they're willing to come help avenge Jiraiya? Not sure there will be an opportunity for them to do so, but it would be good to get them onboard first."
"Why no opportunity?" Tenten asked.
"The report on the Battle of Nagi Island," Hazō said. "It came out a couple of weeks after everyone got back from the Chūnin Exams and it was circulated to all the Clan Heads including, for my sins, me. The Kage and their people did summon a lot of firepower from the Seventh Path. All of the summons popped the moment they came within a certain distance of the battlefield, as though they had run into a brick wall. Apparently it was one of what appears to be a ludicrous grab-bag of powers possessed by that Pain kid who was leading the Akatsuki. He confirmed it in the discussion that happened between the end of the battle and the resurrection of his people." One corner of his mouth smiled as he added, "The exception, of course, being Ma and Pa Toad. Somehow, Jiraiya kept them on the field even when all the other big bads were popping. The report has no mention of how he did it, but I'm sure he was incredibly smug."
"But, if it was one of his powers and he's dead...?" Yuno asked.
"Then hopefully it really was his power and not some seal array that they had buried under the field, or a power of one of the others, or something about the ritual or that machine that they were using to run it, or something that can be duplicated with a seal array. Because if it wasn't his power then there's a chance we could see it again. Which, if we've built our strategy around bringing in Boss Summons, would really suck."
"Ah." Yuno said faintly.
Author's Note: Out of energy for this. Here's a few things I didn't get to:
Clarification: The players wanted to use copies of "How to Runecraft 101" as a deadman switch. The QMs discussed this in some detail and decided that Hazōpilot would overrule you and refuse to do it. Being trained by Kagome, whose incredible levels of caution can actually provide a game-mechanical bonus on sealing, and having experienced some bad runic failures, there was simply no way Hazō would be willing to risk the number of failures that would also happen. Also, for clarity, we have not come to consensus on "it is completely impossible to learn runecrafting from a book" but that is definitely the way the conversation is leaning so if we are ever required to make a decision that's probably where it will land.
Bits from the plan, posed and responded in Q/A format:
Q: Our Rift Assault strategies all require extra chakra from Leaf, how likely is it that Orochimaru is attempting this without drawing on them for support?
A: No one can has enough information to tell.
Q: How likely do you think Orochimaru betraying us is? Both before we assault the Rift and afterwards. Does the assessment change if he doesn't want to involve Leaf?
A: The first part was hopefully addressed in the update. If he doesn't want to involve Leaf then it's more likely (but not certain!) that he doesn't intend to go back, so treachery becomes more likely.
Q: If Orochimaru is unjustifiably insisting that we don't include Leaf, can we force the issue? That is, insist on Leaf's involvement as a condition for Team Uplift's participation.
A: Go for it. Orochimaru is well known for his gracious and prosocial behavior when thwarted.
Q: [what about other deadman switches?]
A: In private, after everyone else went to bed, Mari approached you about a failsafe. If you die, she is willing to spread the knowledge about Elemental Mastery nukes. Although she does not know the actual jutsu, all that anyone really needs is "if you make a jutsu that cools the air enough, this is what happens" and you're off to the races.
Research issues: I'm sorry I didn't get to this part, I suspect it would have been the most fun piece of the plan. Maybe if I get some spoons I'll write it as a bonus scene.
You told Kei and Mari that you were going to work on Superchillers and that you weren't asking permission. Kei was upset, obviously. She understood where you're coming from. She'll think about how to disguise it. Neither she nor Mari are able to predict Orochimaru's actions with confidence, although Mari thinks that the knowledge Hazō can make runic WMDs would be behavior-determinative for Orochimaru, meaning that his other plans would reshape themselves and shuffle priorities in accord with whatever reaction he makes. He probably wouldn't put the rift assault on hold but everything else would likely stop until he had addressed this issue. He might want to buy the secret from Hazō and then keep him alive in as 'no killing the golden goose' way, he might want to kill Hazō to prevent the spread of WMDs, and he will definitely start seeking them himself once the idea is made available to him.
You researched Superchillers. We'll get back to you with the results.
XP AWARD: 3 This update covered a few hours in the evening and all of the following day. The plan was difficult to write for as meetings are hard to make interesting and a few lines ended up seeming out of order as to when they should organically happen in the conversation, meaning I needed to double back and work to bridge between sections.
Brevity XP: 0 Plan was 399 words.
"GM had fun" XP: 0
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, .
Last edited: