Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[strange_person]

in exchange for benefits, such as retaining first priority on chakra.

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in exchange for benefits, such as retaining first priority on chakra.

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Rather than focusing on priority within a limited resource pool, I'd prefer to approach that in terms of him using Kage powers to regulate and expand the amount of readily-transferred chakra which Leaf has available at any given time, ensuring it doesn't become scarce even as chakra-intensive training strategies grow more widespread and routine. Importing more chakra goldfish, for example. Not that we shouldn't also try to secure priority if it becomes necessary, just, y'know, growth mindset.

Tangentially, would it be possible to somehow arrange those changes to reduce the academy's accidental-death-due-to-overtraining rate at the same time? Draining kids right before they go home for the day so they're not tempted to try stuff unsupervised, or topping them up so they can rapidly iterate on some technique and get it figured out all at once instead of being bottlenecked by mediocre reserves, or... regardless of specifics, there's horrifying inefficiencies there, gotta be some way that precisely adjusting the amount of chakra available to individuals could help.

 

[Left-Hand Mutant]

Ooh, my Army of One suggestion got used. That feels nice.

@Left-Hand Mutant this only asks for apprenticeship for Hazou, I know you've been advocating for all three of the kids but I was largely convinced by @Noumero 's argument here. Do you have a rebuttal to it?

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Sure, got a lot of rebuttal, but was disengaging with the thread.
Gonna jot some stuff down lmk if anything is unclear.

As I understand, us making Hazou ask the Toad Sages for training is motivated by two reasons, one of which makes no in-universe sense:

1. We want to extract the information about the fundamentals of chakra/Paths out of them, so that we may design weapons based on those principles.
2. We want higher XP rates, which their apprenticeship would provide.

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I'm personally lukewarm on 1, but others proposed it and it's worth a try.

This misses the really import point 3: Sage mode +Vampiric Dew +a Sage Mode teammate results in ~infinite chakra. Given that all of the PCs are summoners, and two of them are SC users with capstone resolve, they can directly convert chakra into combat power at 1:1, without limit.
This ends with us having infinite training chakra, and a 2-man goketsu team outputting enough offencive power to match a middleing ninga village.(ie summoning half the military forces of Dog and Pangolin, and suffering zero attrition even if our forces are "killed". Alternately, going into battle with 30 SC each, all brimming with Chakra).

"singlehandedly an Isan-sized military asset" is great for preserving our agency, and gives us the option to do kickass stuff in the future, and generally keeps our options open and let's us be major players. Plus, not being reliant on Leaf for Chakra might be useful in the future.

But okay, we want more XP, we strung together some IC justification, I vaguely recall @Shrooms quoting some crazy high numbers at me, let's try to make it work.

How can we make it work, then? As above, the IC justifications are pretty flimsy, they'd sound flimsy to the Toad Sages as well, and they're probably not too keen on taking apprentices, especially if it's someone who isn't even the Toad Summoner. So this is probably not doable, and if it is, it'd be a pretty challenging pitch.

And what would make that pitch even more challenging? Why, asking them to mentor three people, rather than just one.

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I think "The Toad Summoner and his siblings" is a more likely pitch than "The summoner's brother, but not the summoner himself "
Also, this training is *much* more powerful if Noburi has it to.

Plus, if it's all three of us, Noburi can take point on the socials. This gives us *much* better odds on stats alone, even before you factor in that he's got much more right to make big asks, and he's spent the last 2 years building rapport with the Toad Sages.

On top of that:

• I recalled @Sir Stompy objecting to trying to include Noburi on the basis of "Naruto will want him in Leaf on the Human Path most of the time, so that he's always ready to power up a defensive Summon Rush; he can't be with the Sages most of the day getting mentored", making this idea non-viable.

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Zoo Rush takes to much setup to be used if we're on the backfoot, Naruto mostly cares about having Noburi rebalance chakra each morning.

And it's beside the point, but Stompy's estimate of ~8 hours to contact Noburi is way off.
Instead of waiting for him to unsummon in the evening, Naruto can contact Noburi in minutes, by sending a SC runner to (Kei/Neji/Ruri/soon Kurnai). they all have ways of transporting a small group of summons to Toad where they can quickly reach Noburi, which can be done in advance if Naruto cares so much. Transit methods include "overland travel" "swimming" 'spacetime Conjura delivery' and the universally applicable "skywalkers and running".

• It isn't even yet clear whether Kei can get to Toad.

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Toad and Pangolin are allies(and I think they're adjacent?). If not, Kei has skywalkers. The Crusade truce is still active, and the Clank bosses aren't back home yet anyways. She can walk a summon there by tomorrow.

• We're not going to talk to the Toad Sages right this minute, we're not even optimizing the pitch with Noburi, so if your idea has merit, you'd still have the ability to advocate for it on those more appropriate occasions.

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On it.
Are there any concerns either of you have that I didn't address?
Anything you dispute in my argument?

 

[Inferno Vulpix]

Rather than focusing on priority within a limited resource pool, I'd prefer to approach that in terms of him using Kage powers to regulate and expand the amount of readily-transferred chakra which Leaf has available at any given time, ensuring it doesn't become scarce even as chakra-intensive training strategies grow more widespread and routine. Importing more chakra goldfish, for example. Not that we shouldn't also try to secure priority if it becomes necessary, just, y'know, growth mindset.

Tangentially, would it be possible to somehow arrange those changes to reduce the academy's accidental-death-due-to-overtraining rate at the same time? Draining kids right before they go home for the day so they're not tempted to try stuff unsupervised, or topping them up so they can rapidly iterate on some technique and get it figured out all at once instead of being bottlenecked by mediocre reserves, or... regardless of specifics, there's horrifying inefficiencies there, gotta be some way that precisely adjusting the amount of chakra available to individuals could help.

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As long as our supply of chakra is secure, the rest is Naruto's prerogative. He can trade with the Wakahisa for the rights to raise more koi, or find specialists to train to raise more koi in secret, or whatever other things he thinks up to increase the number of FOOMing Leaf-nin.

I'm not super averse to throwing some ideas his way, but asking for priority was definitely the right call here. I care most about maximizing our FOOM, which means "top priority on a pool that's at least large enough to accommodate us" is strictly superior to "equal priority on a pool that may or may not be large enough to accommodate everyone Naruto inducts into the program."

 

[Nebulus]

Ami didn't even know what he means. If Hinata/the Hyuuga being behind e. g. the Bank Run incident is supposed to be something that's obvious to everyone, it sure wasn't obvious even to our multiple social specs. I'd written up a whole paranoid analysis about this a while ago.

So either Naruto got access to some behind-the-scenes information after becoming Kage, and is now falling prey to the illusion of transparency, or all our advisors have been consistently lying to us.

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Lmao, then to me, it's much more likely that Hinata has deceived *Leaf* into thinking she hoodwinked us, though in fact she's been fair (which is only known to social specs, which is also why nobody felt the need to tell us).
edit: or did you mean that Ami knew about the Hyuga-hoodwinked-us theory but couldn't explain it?

So if we scale this up to a rune, we can get a rune that generates Minato shadow clones?

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No, but we can do-

Wait a minute. Do you guys know what this means?

Genjutsu Seals.

We're so fucking back.

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You stole my thunder!! But yes, genjutsu seals

 

[strange_person]

I'm not super averse to throwing some ideas his way, but asking for priority was definitely the right call here.

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Fair enough, I'm not as good with political stuff in general. My thinking was we don't want it to be too much of an adversarial thing, and approaching from the angle of "what's best for Leaf as a whole over the long term," making it clear we're trying to get out in front of the strategic issue before it turns into a full crisis, could be beneficial for trust.

 

[Inferno Vulpix]

Fair enough, I'm not as good with political stuff in general. My thinking was we don't want it to be too much of an adversarial thing, and approaching from the angle of "what's best for Leaf as a whole over the long term," making it clear we're trying to get out in front of the strategic issue before it turns into a full crisis, could be beneficial for trust.

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In fairness, a major part of the reason we didn't share FOOM with Leaf already is that we don't want everyone else in Leaf to be FOOMing. Power comes down the barrel of a gun in this world, if you can't slam a Rasengan through the table you have to beg to get people to listen to you. If we want to control Leaf's future, align it with Uplift, we have to be the biggest guns around. The ideal outcome was "Everyone in Team Uplift is an S-Ranker and together we represent over 50% of the village's military power" because then, well, then Leaf belongs to us.

Contrast if every top Jounin starts FOOMing too. Sasuke was probably gonna hit S-Rank even without FOOM, he's just that kind of talent, which means with FOOM he's going to get there all the faster and push even further beyond that (being a lot more talented than us, he gets more bang for his buck out of FOOM and quickly starts outscaling us). Kei Ruri, too, she's clearly good at what she does but FOOM might give her the boost needed to reach actual factual S-Rank. Then toss in *gestures vaguely* whoever else shows sufficient promise. Heck, as the Turtle Summoner even Neji might get hooked up to the FOOM juice one day. Now imagine all of Uplift as S-Rankers, but now we're only 25% of the village's military power. Still a great outcome, but the rest of Leaf can and will overrule us if they don't like what we're peddling (things like, you know, peace with other nations, civilian's rights, reducing how dictatorial the villages are, etc.).

But then, we've been increasingly less and less in a position to play that strat, since it relies on Leaf still being a power worth caring about. Maybe it really is for the best that Sasuke's going to hit S Rank even faster, if it means keeping Leaf safe long enough for our star to fully rise. Of course, it's not a black and white thing, perhaps it's to our advantage that Sasuke and Ruri get to FOOM with us but Neji doesn't, if Sasuke and Ruri is enough to keep Leaf safe but Neji would just dilute our power. So perhaps it's to our advantage to not throw our support behind expanding FOOM supply, or maybe it is. Depends how you weight the risks and rewards.

What I can say, though, is that we were keeping it secret for a reason. Our position here is adversarial, at least a bit, because we want to maximize Uplift and everyone who isn't fully on-board with that will eventually come into conflict with us about it. I want all the best for Leaf but despite that, no, because of that, we have to be the strongest guys around. Orochimaru can bend Leaf to his whims because of his strength, and his demands are much more horrid than "I think this will make everyone's lives better". If we can't bend Leaf to our whims, we're stuck politely petitioning Naruto and Shikamaru if we want to get anything done, and we can expect to get blocked every time we do something silly like "try to make peace with our enemies" or whatnot.

 

[Noumero]

[X] Action Plan: Jiraiya's Heir (Redux)

I'm personally lukewarm on 1, but others proposed it and it's worth a try.

This misses the really import point 3: Sage mode +Vampiric Dew +a Sage Mode teammate results in ~infinite chakra. Given that all of the PCs are summoners, and two of them are SC users with capstone resolve, they can directly convert chakra into combat power at 1:1, without limit.
This ends with us having infinite training chakra, and a 2-man goketsu team outputting enough offencive power to match a middleing ninga village.(ie summoning half the military forces of Dog and Pangolin, and suffering zero attrition even if our forces are "killed". Alternately, going into battle with 30 SC each, all brimming with Chakra).

"singlehandedly an Isan-sized military asset" is great for preserving our agency, and gives us the option to do kickass stuff in the future, and generally keeps our options open and let's us be major players. Plus, not being reliant on Leaf for Chakra might be useful in the future.

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I'm skeptical that any of us can get Sage Mode in the relevant timeframe... but this is the sort of stuff I'd noticed myself being unfairly skeptical of (mostly by underestimating how long the relevant timeframes tend to be). So I'll grant that point.

I think "The Toad Summoner and his siblings" is a more likely pitch than "The summoner's brother, but not the summoner himself "

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My feel is that "the Toad Summoner and his siblings" is going to be interpreted as a door-in-the-face opening offer which the Toad Sages are supposed to negotiate down to training just Noburi. Since our actual minimal acceptable demand is training only Hazou instead, I expect that disalignment to lead to messy negotiations and to a worse spread of outcomes.

Plus, if it's all three of us, Noburi can take point on the socials. This gives us *much* better odds on stats alone, even before you factor in that he's got much more right to make big asks

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IIRC, the argument is that Hazou has a bigger right to make asks, because he (1) was and is pivotal to saving their Path from an existential threat, (2) is a genius sealmaster who is currently pivotal to saving the Human Path from the Akatsuki, (3) is a genius sealmaster who may be able to resurrect Jiraiya. Whereas Noburi is just some cool kid they know.

Instead of waiting for him to unsummon in the evening, Naruto can contact Noburi in minutes, by sending a SC runner to (Kei/Neji/Ruri/soon Kurnai). they all have ways of transporting a small group of summons to Toad where they can quickly reach Noburi, which can be done in advance if Naruto cares so much. Transit methods include "overland travel" "swimming" 'spacetime Conjura delivery' and the universally applicable "skywalkers and running".

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Toad and Pangolin are allies(and I think they're adjacent?). If not, Kei has skywalkers. The Crusade truce is still active, and the Clank bosses aren't back home yet anyways. She can walk a summon there by tomorrow.

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I don't have hard numbers regarding distances, but we've historically faced much more difficulties passing messages and Summons between Clans. That happened at months-long timescales, not minutes-long.

Maybe the trade network has changed that? I'm not up-to-date on how that functions.

But, anyway, I'm not principally against floating that idea by Noburi and Kei now, and optimizing our pitch to the Sages to suit if they think that can work. @Sir Stompy, thoughts?

 

[strange_person]

If we want to control Leaf's future, align it with Uplift, we have to be the biggest guns around. The ideal outcome was "Everyone in Team Uplift is an S-Ranker and together we represent over 50% of the village's military power" because then, well, then Leaf belongs to us.

Contrast if every top Jounin starts FOOMing too.

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In that case the thing to worry about isn't really our own personal priority access to chakra, it's retaining the ability to veto anti-Uplift Jounin from being invited into the FOOM clubhouse - which would be a significant long-term political concession on Naruto's part, but potentially one he'd be willing to accept if the terms are such that marginal cost to Leaf's overall military readiness (by prioritizing ideological compatibility over pure violent competence) is low enough.

 

[Lord Marshal]

What I can say, though, is that we were keeping it secret for a reason. Our position here is adversarial, at least a bit, because we want to maximize Uplift and everyone who isn't fully on-board with that will eventually come into conflict with us about it. I want all the best for Leaf but despite that, no, because of that, we have to be the strongest guys around. Orochimaru can bend Leaf to his whims because of his strength, and his demands are much more horrid than "I think this will make everyone's lives better". If we can't bend Leaf to our whims, we're stuck politely petitioning Naruto and Shikamaru if we want to get anything done, and we can expect to get blocked every time we do something silly like "try to make peace with our enemies" or whatnot.

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To add on that, no Clan would willingly empower people that would use said power to them assassinate them. This is why i believe we can/should reach some time of understanding with Naruto regarding who gets to FOOM. For the simple reason that asking a clan to make their rivals stronger will not go well, Hokage's tyrant power or not.
Even if personally i believe our relationship with Naruto should be cooperative, one thing is true: we(well,Noburi) is the "Key" to FOOM, and it's to Naruto's advantage to not only lose not the key (by being forced to execute him, for example), but also keep the key happy, and the easiest step to do so is to keep the Goketsu in the loop of who gets FOOM and always have Noburi's approval. (Especially because Naruto also doesn't want super hyuuga conquering Leaf or other nonsense, so it's not like cooperation is particularly costly for him).
I mean, depending on how Mari plays it, we could even ask every ninja that use FOOM to give a portion of their secret in exchange for the training: the FOOM negotiation, in other situations, could have been an arc by itself

 

[redzonejoe]

In that case the thing to worry about isn't really our own personal priority access to chakra, it's retaining the ability to veto anti-Uplift Jounin from being invited into the FOOM clubhouse

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I mean, depending on how Mari plays it, we could even ask every ninja that use FOOM to give a portion of their secret in exchange for the training: the FOOM negotiation, in other situations, could have been an arc by itself

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See, this is the kind of shit I want to enable her to do. This is what I meant when I wanted to give Mari more freedom to negotiate however she feels is best. Going from 'Drive a hard bargain + specific suggestions' to 'feel free to drive a ruthlessly hard bargain + specific suggestions' is not the kind of freedom I was advocating for. Soft power, influence, obligations. Stuff that might not be immediately tangible could still end up being more useful. Let Mari handle everything about it, all we need to tell her is that we don't want to sell FOOM lightly. It's a good secret, Mari, see what you can get out of it.

 

[Velorien]

The enemy of the state was in you all along? The enemy of the state was the friends you made along the way?

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Is this a description of the early quest?

 

[strange_person]

See, this is the kind of shit I want to enable her to do. This is what I meant when I wanted to give Mari more freedom to negotiate however she feels is best. Going from 'Drive a hard bargain + specific suggestions' to 'feel free to drive a ruthlessly hard bargain + specific suggestions' is not the kind of freedom I was advocating for. Soft power, influence, obligations. Stuff that might not be immediately tangible could still end up being more useful. Let Mari handle everything about it, all we need to tell her is that we don't want to sell FOOM lightly. It's a good secret, Mari, see what you can get out of it.

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Giving the social spec room to maneuver is sensible, but clarifying the overall strategic goal is also important. If we only end up outright owning, say, 45% of Leaf's total combat power, but another fifteen, twenty, thirty-plus percent is newly FOOM'd-up essies who, while they aren't under the Goketsu's thumb in general, will gladly do Uplift-compatible stuff on their own initiative, that'd arguably be a better overall outcome than, say, 51% Goketsu, 49% Hagoromo.

 

[Emstar]

"you told us that it was EXCLUSIVELY clan who died but now you're saying that Joe Bob Clanless Guy's big brother died that night? Clearly it was a complicated assassination plot by Jashin worshippers collaborating with the Color Cabal and the SSSSS to take out an agent of one of the counter-cabals that we have decided exist despite having no actual evidence thereof and this totally proves all our theories!!!"

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I can't believe that Danzou killed Joe Bob Clanless Guy's big brother

His life was hard enough with such a long name...

 

[ContextBot]

I didn't realise he could do weddings- OH NOT LIKE THAT

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Hazou has been the nice face to Neji since the chunnin exams.

Neji looked up suspiciously, but there was nothing but sincerity on Gōketsu's face; oddly, Neji couldn't help but believe that the other boy really would give credit where it was due.

"Thank you, Gōketsu," he said.

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We can fix him we have the social skills ! I swear!

and if he ever slips up, she will notice and know what to do.

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Hinata-Neji-Hazou romance! More complication for the Family Tree!

 

[Lysbeth Succubus]

Hinata-Neji-Hazou romance! More complication for the Family Tree!

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Alternately, make it extremely simple. Project: Omnicule. We can do this. We have runes now.

 

[Halberdier]

Would it be worth putting 10 words into a plan about conveying what Naruto said about the Hyuga to the checkers?
"Naruto said Hyuga were our biggest enemy, are we missing something?"

(Okay, that was 11, sorry)

 

[RandomOTP]

Alternately, make it extremely simple. Project: Omnicule. We can do this. We have runes now.

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Noburi dates Neji, Tenten (who is dating Kei) begins dating Yuno (who is married to Noburi). Hazou (who is Noburi's brother) begins dating Hinata (who is Neji's cousin). Snowflake (who is dating Kei and Tenten) begins dating Hazou.

 

[Buggy]

Noburi dates Neji, Tenten (who is dating Kei) begins dating Yuno (who is married to Noburi). Hazou (who is Noburi's brother) begins dating Hinata (who is Neji's cousin). Snowflake (who is dating Kei and Tenten) begins dating Hazou.

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At some point, Hazo has to pull out a flowchart and graphs to explain the plan properly. All of his sanity checkers groan.

 

[RandomOTP]

At some point, Hazo has to pull out a flowchart and graphs to explain the plan properly. All of his sanity checkers groan.

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AMI (grinning mischievously): "And where am I, in all of this?"

HAZOU (countering): "Where do you want to be?"

 

[Lord Marshal]

If Asuma had intel on who was responsible for our troubles in Leaf and kept it hidden from us, i'll be irritated. On the other hand, he did get killed by Hidan, so i can't be that angry at him.

EDIT: btw, what are the chances of the Akatsuki doing an "Akatsuki found out who framed Asuma" and visiting Leaf by surprise?

 

[Noumero]

See, this is the kind of shit I want to enable her to do. This is what I meant when I wanted to give Mari more freedom to negotiate however she feels is best. Going from 'Drive a hard bargain + specific suggestions' to 'feel free to drive a ruthlessly hard bargain + specific suggestions' is not the kind of freedom I was advocating for. Soft power, influence, obligations. Stuff that might not be immediately tangible could still end up being more useful. Let Mari handle everything about it, all we need to tell her is that we don't want to sell FOOM lightly. It's a good secret, Mari, see what you can get out of it.

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I hadn't been impressed, historically, with what happened when we gave our political operators this sort of freedom to maneuver. The stuff they choose to prioritize usually ends up misaligned with our own long-terms policies – they get us tools that we can't or won't use efficiently, and which often end up washed away by the next disaster or which we lose control of due to, again, not using them.

Ami founding the KEI as an interpretation of our "maximize the Gouketsu's political power" favour comes to mind. Sure it ended up beneficial over the long term, but it also consumed the discontent of the masses of clanless ninja and conglomerated them into its own entity, thereby destroying our ability to unite them under the Gouketsu banner. We could have leveraged our position at the time the KEI was formed to get us more control over it, but that required active participation in subtle political maneuvering on our part, which we didn't do. As the result, it arguably actually decreased our long-term relative power in Leaf, compared to the counterfactual in which the clanless had no recourse but to support the Gouketsu.

The Uchiha deal that Mari negotiated also comes to mind. OOC issues aside, she'd prioritized long-term investments that'd end up paying out over decades rather than short-term payoff. That misaligned with our objectives:

"The terms are that we get one marker for each year that a kid is born but we get two markers for each Sharingan ninja we produce. Regardless, those are a lot of tools to work with." She thought about it. "So, basically, you are completely uninterested in every part of the deal except the Hokage vote and three initial markers. If they vote instead of abstaining then you're willing to throw out everything that I got for us, plus pay them more money."

Hazō winced. "That wasn't what I meant," he began.

She shrugged. "It's fine. I got the deal that I got because it was workable, attractive enough to negotiate quickly, and would give us enormously increased political power in Leaf in the short term and control of one of the founding clans in the long term. I modeled you wrong, and that's my mistake—I thought the long-term stuff would be more appealing, but clearly it's the immediate future that you consider most important." She considered. "That's fair. The Hokage vote has very long-term implications, so I guess I see why you're willing to trade everything else for a slightly improved chance of getting the result we want.

"Anyway, sorry for getting you wrong...the first job of a spy or a negotiator is to know what her handler wants, and I clearly failed at that."

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Focusing on soft power did not, historically, do much for us. Hard power – summoning scrolls, sealing notes, sealing proficiency, WMDs, truckloads of money – is the kind of power that actually has an ontological momentum, the kind of power that isn't going to evaporate the moment we look away for a moment.

So I'd like to clearly instruct Mari to get us that, rather than subtle political tools that we can't/won't use in the short time before they're gone.

 

[ContextBot]

"Naruto said Hyuga were our biggest enemy, are we missing something?"

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I think this is kind of obvious.

They are nationalists/jingoists, they want Leaf to be the strongest nation and would run over a lot of ninja and civilian lives for that. Hagoromo Ritsuo would have allowed that and him and Choza would not trust AMITY very much.

Beyond that they are seemingly flexible, considering that Hiashi paid for the Turtle scroll both with money and his reputation. He also didn't just try to seize the other two scrolls but probably trying to play politics for Snake/Dog.

Them getting fed up isn't really suprising, besides Hiashi, his wife and some random cousin Neji mentioned, those also died:

• Hyūga Harue - chūnin - KIA
• Hyūga Masafumi - jōnin - KIA
• Hyūga Sukenobu - chūnin - KIA

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That's a lot of powerful relatives that died trying to keep the country safe and who knows how many friends.

Our projects are still very if not extremely helpful and Hazou and Kagome provide a lot of seals for Tower+Goketsu. But with four summoning scrolls and a elite Jonin that spent a lot of time in the village, it must look for them that Goketsu is sitting a lot around in the village, hording power and being decadent.

Mix that situation with ambition and some ancient lore that says they are choosen one or something and we get the current situation.

So in my conclusion they are more our "greatest" enemy because they are going to push for war and supremacy, not specifically to stop humanitarian or pro civilian projects. It's just way down their list of priorities.

Focusing on soft power did not, historically, do much for us

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but that required active participation in subtle political maneuvering on our part, which we didn't do.

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True but also debatable, good relations with Asuma gave us access to Enma who gave us a lot of information on the Scrolls and was pretty much crucial for the Conclave, because he trusted Asuma's judgment and eventually Hazo.

So like you said, we're mostly at fault here by basically not using it right, why not try now?

Anyway, I am not stuck on taking Neji, could be good, could be bad.

 

[strange_person]

Focusing on soft power did not, historically, do much for us. Hard power – summoning scrolls, sealing notes, sealing proficiency, WMDs, truckloads of money – is the kind of power that actually has an ontological momentum, the kind of power that isn't going to evaporate the moment we look away for a moment.

So I'd like to clearly instruct Mari to get us that, rather than subtle political tools that we can't/won't use in the short time before they're gone.

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Hard power directly on the table here is that Noburi and Naruto, plus trusted advisors, can simply sift through a stack of dossiers on Leaf chūnin, sorting them into two piles: "soon-to-be jōnin / S-rank" and "remainder of career as a chakra battery," based on any criteria they want, with... not absolute, but quite possibly historically unprecedented levels of ability to enforce those decisions. Mari is in the position of negotiating for what those sorting criteria will be.

 

[Emstar]

[X] Action Plan: Jiraiya's Heir (Redux)

 

[Sir Stompy]

This misses the really import point 3: Sage mode +Vampiric Dew +a Sage Mode teammate results in ~infinite chakra. Given that all of the PCs are summoners, and two of them are SC users with capstone resolve, they can directly convert chakra into combat power at 1:1, without limit.
This ends with us having infinite training chakra, and a 2-man goketsu team outputting enough offencive power to match a middleing ninga village.(ie summoning half the military forces of Dog and Pangolin, and suffering zero attrition even if our forces are "killed". Alternately, going into battle with 30 SC each, all brimming with Chakra).

"singlehandedly an Isan-sized military asset" is great for preserving our agency, and gives us the option to do kickass stuff in the future, and generally keeps our options open and let's us be major players. Plus, not being reliant on Leaf for Chakra might be useful in the future.

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I don't think we'll be given Sage Mode immediately. I think our other methods to infinite chakra (Sage Stones) are more likely to pay off first. How long do you think it will take them to teach us Sage Mode? IMO it's more than a year off.

And it's beside the point, but Stompy's estimate of ~8 hours to contact Noburi is way off.
Instead of waiting for him to unsummon in the evening, Naruto can contact Noburi in minutes, by sending a SC runner to (Kei/Neji/Ruri/soon Kurnai). they all have ways of transporting a small group of summons to Toad where they can quickly reach Noburi, which can be done in advance if Naruto cares so much. Transit methods include "overland travel" "swimming" 'spacetime Conjura delivery' and the universally applicable "skywalkers and running".

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I maintain that this is harder than you think.

Unless those Summoners have their Summons stationed at the Toad Sage's house it will take hours to contact Noburi. Historically, we have struggled to have the other Bosses assign their Clanmembers to play message runner for a foreign entity (Leaf in this case).

On skywalkers, the travel time from the Pangolin Border to Toad Sages is likely ~4 hours, and IIRC they're the closest. Additionally, Kei is leaving Leaf soon, so forget about the Pangolins it's worse than that. The Condors are much further than that - thousands of miles. Having Conjura play message runner is laughable, she would never deign to do that unless her people's survival was at stake. I don't recall where Turtle and Porcupine are exactly, but I don't think they're as close as the Pangs. Snake and Slug are closer, but that involves roping in Oro and Tsunade, and if Leaf is under imminent threat, you don't want them playing messenger.

Toad and Pangolin are allies(and I think they're adjacent?). If not, Kei has skywalkers. The Crusade truce is still active, and the Clank bosses aren't back home yet anyways. She can walk a summon there by tomorrow.

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If Pantsaa agrees. Yes. Moderately sized if, that's why we're asking.

I'm skeptical that any of us can get Sage Mode in the relevant timeframe... but this is the sort of stuff I'd noticed myself being unfairly skeptical of (mostly by underestimating how long the relevant timeframes tend to be). So I'll grant that point.

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Same here, I think they'll want Hazou and others to be a jounin to minimize chances for leaks.

My feel is that "the Toad Summoner and his siblings" is going to be interpreted as a door-in-the-face opening offer which the Toad Sages are supposed to negotiate down to training just Noburi. Since our actual minimal acceptable demand is training only Hazou instead, I expect that disalignment to lead to messy negotiations and to a worse spread of outcomes.

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Also this, we're asking for a lot here just for them to train Hazou and asking for the entire team is roughly 3x as much.

IIRC, the argument is that Hazou has a bigger right to make asks, because he (1) was and is pivotal to saving their Path from an existential threat, (2) is a genius sealmaster who is currently pivotal to saving the Human Path from the Akatsuki, (3) is a genius sealmaster who may be able to resurrect Jiraiya. Whereas Noburi is just some cool kid they know.

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Also a compelling point here.

But, anyway, I'm not principally against floating that idea by Noburi and Kei now, and optimizing our pitch to the Sages to suit if they think that can work. @Sir Stompy, thoughts?

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I'm willing to do this, it'll push the plan to <599 words.

@Left-Hand Mutant is this a sufficient compromise? We float both options to the team and have them pick the one that's more likely to work?