Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- naruto rational 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
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- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You're welcome to vote something in. I genuinely have no idea what Snowflake could do right now that would be interesting to write about.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
What about more Snowflake hugs? Certainly, an experiment with only one trial cannot be held to rigorous academic scrutiny?
Practice flirting on Hazou while he's too busy with Sealing to pay attention
[X] Invent EM Nuke Runes anyway
I dunno the sealing mechanics enough to say. But can we research EM Nuke Runes close to complete but not all the way? So in a desperate enough situation we could whip them out in a few hours? But never actually having invented them, we aren't susceptible to leaking them.
I dunno the sealing mechanics enough to say. But can we research EM Nuke Runes close to complete but not all the way? So in a desperate enough situation we could whip them out in a few hours? But never actually having invented them, we aren't susceptible to leaking them.
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We run the risk of accidently completing them in a single cycle.
- Location
- UK
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- He/Him
NARUTO: Man, I could really do with some city-killing runes right now.
HAZŌ: Sorry, Lord Hokage, no such thing.
NARUTO: [rolls S-rank Deceit] What the...? You're exactly 83% lying and 17% telling the truth. How is that even possible?
- Location
- Yes.
HAZŌ: How did you get it down to the percentage?
NARUTO: Never mind that, explain!
HAZŌ: No! Do you have any idea how useful having exact percentages for sealing research is? Explain how you managed this!
Crake
I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING
- Location
- USA
- Location
- U.S.
New rune idea:
Rune of HotBang
Variant of the Rune of Hot Pocket that creates a flashbang.
A storage seal is placed on top of it, and the rune is activated. While active, it seals all light that enters the rune's radius into the storage seal.
use cases:
1: Absolutely fucking obliterating Itachi's retinas.
2: Point a Gamma HOWS Rune at it, absolutely fucking obliterate Itachi's DNA.
Hopefully less of a sealing failure risk compared to superheating the contents of a storage seal, while still remaining potent and portable.
Rune of HotBang
Variant of the Rune of Hot Pocket that creates a flashbang.
A storage seal is placed on top of it, and the rune is activated. While active, it seals all light that enters the rune's radius into the storage seal.
use cases:
1: Absolutely fucking obliterating Itachi's retinas.
2: Point a Gamma HOWS Rune at it, absolutely fucking obliterate Itachi's DNA.
Hopefully less of a sealing failure risk compared to superheating the contents of a storage seal, while still remaining potent and portable.
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- Location
- Italy
The question is: Can we kill the Akatsuki without massive AoE effects? I guess our best bet then is invisible attacks that can be used at extreme range, high enough that the Akatsuki's various chakra sensing abilities cannot see it in time. It does suffer from the problem of requiring the Akatsuki to walk in a killzone made ad-hoc to kill them, instead of putting a rune X kilometers from them and activating it.
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- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Urgh, this is not what I had felt I was voting for. I took "If she's adamantly against it, don't proceed." to mean "void the line about immediately researching them", not "permanently commit to never researching them".
Does Kei understand what she's asking of us? To complete this absurd, nigh-suicidal mission to decisively destroy the most powerful ninjas in the world, without inventing anything strong enough to potentially kill a city? That's a pretty narrow needle to thread, especially when we don't know what research ideas of ours will actually work out. Like, just look at this:
I can't take Hazou's "It's not as if I don't have plenty of other ideas." as consolation when Kei just admitted that she's willing to repeat this entire conversation for whatever we come up with next.
I get it, there's a lot of baggage that comes with weapons this strong. While Kei's thoughts were more detailed than my previous thoughts on the matter they weren't fundamentally new insights to me, this isn't something I haven't considered before. But we are being asked to kill the entire Akatsuki and I think it really really really needs to be said that this is not an easy task that we can afford to hamstring ourselves on. Maybe we can get by without inventing anything strong enough to kill a city. Maybe. Are we to bet everything on that? We're already fully committed now. There's no returning to Leaf unless the Akatsuki is dead. And, of course, we're on an unknown time limit too. If we don't have our solution ready in time, maybe we're forced to deploy it prematurely and fail and die. Maybe we are forced to go missing for real, dealing incredible damage to the Goketsu. It is a bold, bold, bold optimism that says we can afford massive handicaps in this situation, which makes it feel very strange to hear from Kei.
We have ideas, sure. Ideas. How many of our ideas actually work out in practice? How many of our current lines of research will actually deliver the target functionality within the necessary timeframe? I'm skeptical of everything that's not a bird in the hand, and you should be too. We have exactly one research path that's guaranteed to yield results, and that's Elemental Mastery.
And that's why I wouldn't have supported that line of the plan if I had known it would be interpreted like this. Hazou really laid it on thick here, to the point that if he went and researched it anyways it would be a massive betrayal. What do we do if the deadline nears and the mission isn't possible without it? What if we do come up with other WMDs but Kei vetos them all for the same reasons? Do we just make them anyways, and tell Kei to pound sand? And mind you, we don't actually know when the deadline will come. If we mean to avoid the scenario of "Naruto calls, we're out of time, the WMDs need to be ready now" then we need our WMDs ready at some unspecified date before Naruto calls, at which point we will have no concrete evidence that our time is at its end. We will, thus, be forced to make our WMDs in a scenario that appears to be well before the deadline, thus sharpening the betrayal.
Sage, what a mess. I'm honestly extremely tempted to just go research it anyways, because screw banning all WMDs in the "research WMDs" mission with the fate of the world on the line, but now that Hazou's gone and made this stupid commitment it does remain true that whether or not the other research paths work out it's better for us to wait before resorting to researching Elemetnal Mastery. If our other ideas work out, great, as long as we don't let Kei veto those too. If they don't, then Hazou's got a more reasonable motive than if he were to do it now.
But either way, I am not letting Kei stop us from completing this mission.
Zampano
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Location
- Simping for DSB
I think that the way forward here has to be a continuation of this discussion - Kei's constraint is simply too binding for the promise that we've made. EM can maybe be taken off the table because we know it is an easy technique to achieve with Ninjutsu. But preemptively writing off any weapon that has wide-range collateral damage could even ban our nascent Gamma Ray research line.
I'd vote for an ambush plan that uses a dirty bomb to kill Itachi, for example. Even if that dirty bomb could be weaponized or iterated on in future escalations of warfare.
We can't fight this war while simultaneously trying to manage every possible escalation of combat in the future.
I'd vote for an ambush plan that uses a dirty bomb to kill Itachi, for example. Even if that dirty bomb could be weaponized or iterated on in future escalations of warfare.
We can't fight this war while simultaneously trying to manage every possible escalation of combat in the future.
No, I had collateral damage in mind with it. It has a normal amount of collateral compared to any AoE jutsu with no fallout. It's a large part of why I mentioned the real-life precedent of it being used to sterilize medical equipment or food. It would be possible to research gamma WMDs but that'd be very separate from the basic concept of weaponizing gamma.
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- United States
@Velorien, the way the chapter ended feels like it's taking a lot of our agency to decide how Hazō proceeds, at least to me.
Was that an intentional choice or just a disconnect between how the plan was written and how it was read?
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- Fifth Dimension
Yeah, how else does she expect us to kill a group of essies without killing the city they're in? Anything else requires us to be there in person and that's sacrificial at best, possibly suicidal.
- Location
- U.S.
In fairness there are potential methods to do so. We could prepare some strong weapons or buffs and hand them to the two remaining sannin, enabling them to fight some proportion of Akatsuki and win where they would normally lose.
Nonetheless, I agree this is a annoying constraint. While she raises good points about the dangers of EM, frankly, most of them are irrelevant. We're barely even planning past a time horizon of >1 year at this point. We've got too many concurrent apocalypses to seriously consider the future. We can worry about putting out the fires we make when we're not in the middle of a inferno.
I'm perfectly comfortable not ever committing atrocities since I have faith that the QMs aren't going to write the quest into a situation where we have to commit atrocities or otherwise do things that violate human decency or SV rules.
EDIT: And for preemptive clarity, I still consider a situation where some entity forces us to either do atrocities or suffer horrible consequences to still be a situation where we have to commit atrocities.
EDIT: And for preemptive clarity, I still consider a situation where some entity forces us to either do atrocities or suffer horrible consequences to still be a situation where we have to commit atrocities.
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- Location
- UK
Some thoughts on the idea, without reference to prior conversation.
- We should get an explicit hard line commitments from Naruto, especially but not only wrt. the security of one-time use weapons. Namely,
- if every time we have an idea we have to double-check if we're OK with the Hokage taking it, we're at minimum going to be hesitant to put all of our secrets in one bag, even if it's optimal—and, to be clear, it's not like Naruto can use our things as-is, unless he's to give it to Oro
- we might want to explore things that are really really bad ideas, things like purposeful sealing failures, things like counterfactual redaction, things where you might trade them against everything but absolutely nothing less than that; we'd want it understood that if we build something to use exactly once, we must have the option to destroy it
- we want carte blanche (secret) permission to ignore orders from Leaf to return home, or anything of that nature that might be coerced out of them, otherwise the strategy of running away doesn't make much sense
- Specific ideas about Elemental Mastery runes:
- protecting a rune from the storm seems significantly more tractable than protecting a seal, but hardly trivial; the storm itself is one thing, and can maybe be sheltered against say by burying it, but thermal shocks are another and can cause cracking — at minimum some safe investigation about how dangerous such temperatures are to it, and at best some direct countermeasure (like a physical and thermal shield as part of the rune or from a secondary) seems advised
- it might be possible to constrain the effect of the rune in a way rather unlike the original jutsu, and is more palatable, for example
- a short duration burst, useful for one-time destruction but not fundamentally more WMD than any other large area of effect
- prevent any of the resulting liquid substance from escaping the area of effect, such that it's an orb of death but not a storm
- make it slightly smaller but allow the liquid to exit only from one direction, so that it's a long-range super soaker; optimization is probably needed but this could be a different kind of thing, more directed, and less obvious to clone
- seal away or remove the resulting liquid, such that maybe you just get the city-wide winds
- we don't actually know what in the Sage Elemental Mastery does—the liquid might be some side-effect of the jutsu rather than the temperature itself, and the air might be disappearing because it's being transformed (but then why doesn't it transform back?) but also it might be disconnected — subscale investigation is warranted
- possibly calling this a city-killer is an understatement
- EM was already city-killer in one cast, and if optimized with the right build was pretty spammable
- runes have potentially vastly larger areas of effect and last longer yet
- things you could do with an overpowered rune version:
- harder to distinguish: make it high enough in the sky that you can't tell what the source is, and Skywalkers can't get close enough for cheaty eyes to spot, and the effect looks less distinguishably like an area's temperature was lowered — not obvious this works, but it's surely different
- good uses: instantly clear out significant fractions of Leaf from chakra beasts — I wonder if Kei's take would adjust if she viewed it as a means of winning Uplift, as I always wanted of the original
For this specific idea, I recall the EM hellstorm scouring the site to bedrock.
- Location
- UK
I was going for concision, but I didn't mean burying it casually. Hazō has jutsu to put it inside some pretty sturdy rock.