Standard storage seal fully loaded with 100kg of photons, regardless of wavelength, would be about 9x10^18 joules. That's not a flashbang, it's a two-megaton nuke. It would also appear as a sphere of utter darkness, bitter cold (unpleasantly reminiscent of EM nuke prodrome effects), and possibly odd electromagnetic effects (from asymmetries on the radio end of the spectrum) while charging up, which could easily be mistaken for a sealing failure.
Also, its specifically worded such that it absorbs only the light entering the sphere. It does not create light. If we want a two megaton nuke, we'd have to leave it sitting in sunlight for about 320 million years (with a meter of surface area).
I think the better usecase is shining a gamma HOWS rune into it.
"Have you made progress on the time-shifting runes?" Kei asked.
Hazō looked up from where he had been ladling beans into his bowl before scurrying back to his calculations. The calculations that sprawled messily across two dozen pages and thirteen scraps of paper pinned under a rock near Hazō's workspace.
"Hm?" he asked, beans dribbling from the side of the ladle as he looked up in surprise. "What? Oh. Yeah, I have." He dropped the ladle and started spooning the beans into his face, eyes looking blankly into the distance.
Kei waited. After a few seconds she cleared her throat.
"Huh? What?"
"On the knoll, you mentioned a time-shifting rune and said we would discuss it later. I confess that my surprise at the topic of discussion caused me to be distracted to the point that I did not remember to pursue the issue at the time. Tell me more about your progress on the time-shifting rune, please."
"Oh...right. Um...so, right now I'm looking at the latest iteration of the Temporal Rune and yes, that is what I have finally decided to call it." He brightened. "I had this cool idea actually, regarding an extended naming pattern. I haven't decided if I actually like it yet, but it was interesting. See, a lot of times something gets called 'version 1', 'version 2', and so on, but I was thinking I could name it by the percentage. The first version was about a 3% speedup so it would be the T103 rune, and the next one will hopefully be the T125, and then after that—"
"The nomenclature pattern is clear, thank you. I note that the purpose of this expedition is weapons research. I suppose the temporal rune is intended to give you more time for researching the things that will actually be fit for purpose?"
"Exactly! Plus, they'll be even more useful once we've dealt with Akatsuki. Free training time that no one else gets except the Gōketsu and their allies."
"My concern is that the effort invested must more than repay itself or it is a poor choice of investment."
"It will."
"...Very well. You are the expert and I shall trust your assessment. So long as you are pursuing this path, have you considered reversing the effect? If you could trap Akatsuki in a region of sufficiently slow time we could simply ignore them from then on."
"I have, yes. It's on my list, a couple items down, and I expect to get to it in a few days. And yeah, sticking them in stretched time sounds great. I have so many ideas." His eyes began to shine with a demonic fever as he looked off into imagination. "We could set up explosives around the perimeter and detonate them in series. Can they dodge the blast of an explosive tag at short range with their stupid S-ranker bullshit? Probably."
Sitting across the fire with his own bowl of beans, Kagome-sensei stopped chewing long enough to grunt in dissatisfaction at Hazō impugning his preferred problem-solving technique.
"On the other hand," Hazō continued, "can they dodge a thousand explosive tags, one after the other, each coming what seems like a fraction of a second after the last one and from a slightly different direction? They'll be in slow time so they won't be regenerating chakra, but we can sit out here throwing whatever we want through the boundary, then go off and have a nap and regen some chakra before going back to it. How do you feel about being known as the woman who killed Itachi with a shuriken through his stupid cheating eyeball? I bet we could get you ten or fifteen thousand shuriken and you could spend a couple of days filling the entire area with an absolute wall of steel."
"I grant that the idea is appealing, yet I suspect there will be some practical challenges."
Hazō waved dismissively. "Eh. It'll be fine."
"I find your confidence both charming and well supported by the historical record. I strongly urge you to commence a newsletter, which I feel certain will be filled with wit and insight."
"Awww, thank you!" Hazō said, surprised. "That's one of the nicest things you've said to me in months."
Kei closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
o-o-o-o
"You look like crap."
"Thank you, Noburi. Your concern is touching, and I'm fine." The sharp words were given the lie when Hazō was suddenly overtaken with a jaw-cracking yawn.
"Crap that's been run over by a wagon, shoveled up, and thrown onto a bigger pile of crap. Seriously, Hazō, get some sleep before you destroy the world."
"I've been pushing a little hard to get some of these calculations done, that's all. Don't worry, I always make sure to be well rested for infusion day. The work is pretty interesting stuff, actually. I came up with a new theorem that proves the maximum number of connections between two field tensors of opposing localizations is three, but if you introduce a third tensor at the halfway point then it increases to twelve. I'm working on extending it to an arbitrary number of tensors; I think it's going to turn out that the maximum in higher-level interactions is the square of the number of tensors plus the number of tensors but there are other possibilities that I need to rule out. If I'm right then—"
"Hazō."
"—it would revolutionize the study of—"
"Hazō."
"...I was nerd dumping, wasn't I?"
"Little bit, yeah."
"Sorry." He glanced at the barrel. "Um."
"It's okay," Noburi said, sliding his arms out of the barrel's straps and setting it on the table of the house in Toad that had been arranged as quarters for the Horizon Chasers and a meeting point for the human summoners. "I got you, bro." He dampened a finger and touched Hazō's wrist for a moment, then dipped out a cup of water and started to pass it over, then pulled it back when Hazō reached for it.
"Before you drink up and vanish on me, I've got a juicy bit of gossip for you."
"Oh?" Hazō struggled not to fidget. His calculations would wait. His brother was important. His calculations would wait. His brother was important. His calculations would wait. His brother was important.
"Yeah. Word just came that there's a new Kage over in Sand. Apparently Tō Fura just got chosen as the Sixth Kazekage. Get this: she's clanless!"
"Whoa, really?"
"Yup. Tō Fura, clanless jōnin of Sand. Her bingo book is pretty out of date but it says she's a weird blend of jutsu and weapons. Created the 'Severing Winds Style' of jutsu-enhanced swordmastery, whatever that means."
"'Jutsu-enhanced swordmastery'," Hazō mused. "Maybe something like that Cloak of the Wind God jutsu that Orochimaru gave us? Wrap wind chakra around a weapon to make it cut better, fly farther."
"Could be, I guess. Seems like there's got to be more to it than that. The intelligence report says that it 'emphasizes mobility and invisible attacks' but there weren't any more details about the combat style. There were, however, details about her. Want to guess?"
"Tell me," Hazō said, struggling not to seem impatient. His brother mattered, and being interested in what Noburi had to say was important. The calculations would wait. Tensor field arrays weren't going to change their maximal connection numbers, not even if he didn't finish creating his masterwork of nonspace mathematics for a few extra minutes.
Noburi could clearly see the insufficiently-hidden impatience in Hazō's eyes, because a grin spread across his face. "Wellll," he said, dragging the word out. "Turns out to be quite the barn-burner. Really impressive, you know? I mean, sure, it's a little thin on details but who would have thought the intelligence department would use language like that in a formal document? It's like imagining Mari volunteering for dish duty. Oh, hey, speaking of: did you by any chance take the blue mug with you? Mari was looking for it, and—"
"Noburi!"
His cruel, thoughtless, mean, ugly, nasty brother cracked up. "Yeah, yeah. The jacket said she is Sand's Hatake Kakashi, less the Dog summons and plus social skills. Which, granted, doesn't say a damned lot on the social front since Hatake was about as social as a mudsnake, but in this case it actually means something. She's quite capable of just slicing up anyone who got in her way to the hat but instead she was unanimously elected and it doesn't even look like it was grudging on anyone's part. Who'da thunk it?"
"A Leaf intelligence briefing said 'who'da thunk it'?"
"Yeah. I don't know for sure, but I think Mitarashi might have written it." He finally passed over the mug of chakra-rich water.
"...That tracks." Hazō accepted the mug and knocked it back, feeling the energy flood back into his body. "Thanks for this, bro. I needed it to infuse this second rune."
"No worries, man." Noburi clapped him on the shoulder. "Go save the world."
"Doing my best."
Author's Note:@Paperclipped might write the conversation with Canabisu or it might get offscreened.
Happy Memorial Day to our American players! I hope you have a good holiday filled with delicious food and good fellowship.
XP AWARD: 79
Brevity XP: 10
"GM had fun" XP: 0 No strong feelings
Day 1
Prep Temporal Rune 125.
Prep Time Stretch.
Day 2
Prep TR125.
Prep Time Stretch.
Day 3
[Hazō buys 1 FP, bringing him to 3 FP.]
Infuse TR125:
Hazō completes the Time Stretch Rune! It works identically to the Fast Forward Rune, except time within the radius flows 3% slower, and this rune lasts for 1 week instead of 1 month. There are no noticeable boundary effects.
Day 4
SSA recovery.
Day 5
SSA recovery.
Day 6
Prep TR125.
Prep Runic Air Dome. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is well within his capabilities.
Hazō completes Temporal Rune 125! He thinks that, contrary to his expectations, reducing the duration has increased the difficulty.
This rune accelerates time by 25% for objects and creatures within its AoE. This is very visible – a clone within the rune's area of effect moves and speaks noticeably faster. There is no partial acceleration of a single target – as long as a target's center of mass is within the AoE, it's accelerated. Hazō thinks that trying to cheese this (e.g. by tying a string to a lead weight to extend the time acceleration very far from the rune) could cause a runic failure.
There are no unusual boundary effects (e.g. red/blue shifting of light, weird air pressures, etc). It works in roughly the way Hazō-the-character would want and expect it to work. If you think physics should have it work a different way, feel free to make your argument for why that should be the case, but chakra may simply raise the middle finger.
Hazō won't get any benefit from this rune in this update, as he'll be safety-testing it with clones and miscellaneous lifeforms collected from around the island. If you want him to start using the time runes in the future (while that term still has meaning), you'll need to vote in a plan specifying how you're using them.
The area of effect is 3 Zones in every direction of the central rune (so if Zones are laid out in a square grid, a 7x7 of Zones). Assuming a sufficiently open area, that's around 100 meters from the central rune in any direction.
Steady progress. Hazō thinks he's a bit less than halfway.
Day 14
SSA recovery
Day 15
SSA recovery
Day 16
Prep TR135. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks he could maybe do this rune.
Prep Runic Air Dome.
Day 17
Prep TR130. Difficulty Result: Hazō thinks this rune is well within his capabilities.
Prep Runic Air Dome.
Day 18
Prep TR130.
Prep Runic Air Dome.
(the first day of prep on Runic Air Dome is nullified as Hazō can only take 2 prep days with Primordial Sealing 18, but Hazōpilot would rather waste that clone-day and get full prep on the Temporal Rune)
These runes are definitely getting hard, especially with Hazō's strict limitation on how long the rune can last. Still, thanks to his steady buildup of veterancy on the time-related runes, things are starting to come together. Hazō thinks he's a little over halfway done with this rune.
Progress continues. Hazō thinks he's over halfway done. Two more cycles should do it, maybe one with Jashin's luck.
Day 20
SSA recovery
Day 21
SSA recovery
Kagome has finished the Scenery Clone Seal Array and has started work on the Silence Shell Seal Array.
Hazō has spent so long working on seals massively below his Sealing score that seal scribing hasn't been an issue. Luckily, Reusable Rocket Boots fixes that. He'll timeladder 3x for Sealing (making infusions take 10 minutes) and 2x for Calligraphy (making scribing take 30 minutes). Thanks to the Iron Nerve, he only needs to make the Calligraphy check once, as long as he does his infusions with Prime hours.
The Light Relay seal can indeed output visible light when the input is tuned to past-blue and exposed to a past-blue HOWS. Hazō tests a variety of output colors across the rainbow and finds they all work, so long as the input tuning matches the tuning of the relevant HOWS.
Hazō has purchased 1 FP and refreshed 1 FP, and is now at 4FP.
A huge thank you to @Paperclipped for doing all the seal research rolls.
For whenever plans happen, here's my rune suggestion:
Time Warp
Creates a sharp temporal gradient across a five-foot-radius sphere, fifteen feet in front of the rune, for half a second. The gradient forces matter to desync from adjoining matter by a fraction of a second. Given Earth gravity, half a second is sufficient for any separated chunks to fall up to ~16 feet. This causes rapid death when vital organs are caught in the area of effect.
This part seems optimistic to me. Say you're moving your arm, the arm is going through sped-up time but the hand is caught in a section that slows time. I don't think this is going to cause the connections between the arm and hand to sever, at least not outright. I do think the kinetic energy multiplied by the time difference is going to cause a lot of stress on the body, but I doubt it'd be as clean as 'oops this body part is temporally shifted and now gravity is free to drag it down to the ground'
It's not a bad idea, I just think it'd work differently than you're expecting. Unless rune magic bridges the gap and makes it do what we want because rune magic.
Hmm. Not the intended idea, if that's how it comes off then I need to edit. Let's say it hits your hand- your hand now exists half a second before you do. Or 3 nanoseconds or whatever. The main point is that it isn't going through slowed time or sped-up time, it's just directly offset. Like teleporting your arm 3 feet to the left without teleporting the rest of you along with it, except through time.
Hmm. Not the intended idea, if that's how it comes off then I need to edit. Let's say it hits your hand- your hand now exists half a second before you do. It isn't going through slowed time or sped-up time, it's just directly offset.
Ah. I'm not sure how that would be achievable precisely, but rune magic I guess. In that case my only objection would be that we haven't figured out how to affect time in the necessary manner yet. It's not time-adjustment, it's straight up time travel. Time teleportation. Seems ambitious.
"I find your confidence both charming and well supported by the historical record. I strongly urge you to commence a newsletter, which I feel certain will be filled with wit and insight."
"Awww, thank you!" Hazō said, surprised. "That's one of the nicest things you've said to me in months."
"Oh?" Hazō struggled not to fidget. His calculations would wait. His brother was important. His calculations would wait. His brother was important. His calculations would wait. His brother was important.
Now that Hazou has gotten, for basically the first time in his life, the opportunity to lighthouse interrupted, his true self (mad scientist) has come to the fore.
Ah. I'm not sure how that would be achievable precisely, but rune magic I guess. In that case my only objection would be that we haven't figured out how to affect time in the necessary manner yet. It's not time-adjustment, it's straight up time travel. Time teleportation. Seems ambitious.
True and I agree, but we have to start somewhere. Hazo was able to figure out a rune affecting the flow of time from basically nothing, so I figure a project like this is a reasonable thing to throw a prep day at. It's relatively unambitious as far as time travel goes, which I admit is a high bar to compare to. If it works, it's useful both as a weapon and an introduction to bigger abuses of time. If it doesn't work, oh well, not much of a loss.
EDIT: Wait I'm a dumbass, I forgot how I originally proposed it. Editing again.
[X] Interlude: Kamehameha Conversation
[X] Interlude: permanent wild Wasteland mode oops
[X] Interlude: I found family was isakaid and now Power Rangers/Super Sentai
[X] Interlude: Hazou has a super villain monologue off the cuff because of course he does
I also think you're significantly underestimating the opposition. All of them are hardy as fuck. That said I don't know what a graser is so can't really say how it compares.
Sorry hazou but to ramble away about your field of study to a person with neither knowledge or interest in it you need them to be either your girlfriend, parents or a captive audience.
That my back-of-the-envelope math managed to underestimate by multiple orders of magnitude without dropping below "strategic nuke" only serves to further emphasize that it's not a mere flashbang.
Also, its specifically worded such that it absorbs only the light entering the sphere. It does not create light. If we want a two megaton nuke, we'd have to leave it sitting in sunlight for about 320 million years (with a meter of surface area).
I think the better usecase is shining a gamma HOWS rune into it.
Why would it have only one square meter of surface area? Hazo's on a time limit, wants this thing to charge up quickly. He'd make the collector as wide as he safely could.
If the resultant cooling sets off weird weather... plenty of energetic photons inside a lightning bolt's plasma channel.
If it extends into the water, cooling a few dozen cubic miles of Aisu Bay by just a few degrees (through accelerated thermohaline circulation) could provide the relevant amount of energy.
If it's grabbing every photon within a volume, rather than only those crossing the border, each individual molecule is effectively surrounded by a zero-kelvin blackbody and will radiate accordingly, with all that radiant heat going into the seal. Even if it's only grabbing right at the border, fluids near the edge experience something similar.
That my back-of-the-envelope math managed to underestimate by multiple orders of magnitude without dropping below "strategic nuke" only serves to further emphasize that it's not a mere flashbang.
No, it's not a mere flashbang. It's intended to at the very least blind enemy combatants, permanently, in a large radius. Or serve as a exotic explosive. Or be combined with gamma HOWS runes to make a portable and potent gamma weapon.
Why would it have only one square meter of surface area? Hazo's on a time limit, wants this thing to charge up quickly. He'd make the collector as wide as he safely could.
If the resultant cooling sets off weird weather... plenty of energetic photons inside a lightning bolt's plasma channel.
If it extends into the water, cooling a few dozen cubic miles of Aisu Bay by just a few degrees (through accelerated thermohaline circulation) could provide the relevant amount of energy.
If it's grabbing every photon within a volume, rather than only those crossing the border, each individual molecule is effectively surrounded by a zero-kelvin blackbody and will radiate accordingly, with all that radiant heat going into the seal. Even if it's only grabbing right at the border, fluids near the edge experience something similar.
Some or many of these would likely work, but I'll caution you to not take chakra effects too literally. Keep in mind that the photon is the force carrier for electromagnetism, and so by a literal interpretation, electromagnetism no longer works within the radius. Which would instantly disintegrate all matter. But that is almost certainly not what would actually happen when the rune is turned on.
Also even if we figure out how to make this into a nuke, we can just... choose not to use it as a nuke?
We did the math on this at some point; this effect probably has to be more like a spacetime effect that repositions matter into a single point. Actually compressing a reasonable amount of mass into a singularity, with physical force, is a non-starter; the final diameter is something like 10^-30 meters.
Yeah, it would only disintegrate enough stuff to power a gigaton nuke, or destroy itself in a sealing failure, whichever comes first. Runic drag surely isn't electromangnetic, so my guess is the rune might be able to hold itself together.
Or if you've got seawater flowing through an aperture that wide, at single-digit miles per hour, emerging frozen solid, I think that would bring it down to a matter of days.
Yeah, it would only disintegrate enough stuff to power a gigaton nuke, or destroy itself in a sealing failure, whichever comes first. Runic drag surely isn't electromangnetic, so my guess is the rune might be able to hold itself together.
No, it would just... not disintegrate matter. Chakra is bullshit and doesn't care about physics. The specs on the rune says it eats light, not disintegrates matter, so it eats light and doesn't disintegrate matter regardless of what physics has to say about it.
Edit, example: Did you know time acceleration, like the time runes we're making right now, has a lot of obvious and strange physical effects? It would expand the volume of the space it's affecting, shift the colors of light passing through the barrier, the barrier would have some physical force behind it, temperatures on different sides of the barriers would shift, etc etc.
None of this happens. We told chakra to accelerate time and it accelerated time. That's it. We didn't ask for a zone of color shifting, so chakra told physics to take a hike with the rest of it, no matter how impossible that actually is.
I would expect a light-eating seal/rune to absorb whatever background radiation was available rather than absorb anything that could be considered electromagnetism. So sunlight and cosmic background, essentially, plus whatever gets deliberately shone upon it.
