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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Velorien said:
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I gotta ask, are these anime screenshots you post original scenes with English subtitles or are they scenes that fit a vibe plus captions added by someone else that also fit the vibe? Just googling the text on the picture often leads me nowhere.
 
Rafin said:
I gotta ask, are these anime screenshots you post original scenes with English subtitles or are they scenes that fit a vibe plus captions added by someone else that also fit the vibe? Just googling the text on the picture often leads me nowhere.
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These are literally screenshots I take while watching anime (or occasionally playing games), chosen for the combination of visual and subtitles.
 
Velorien said:
These are literally screenshots I take while watching anime (or occasionally playing games), chosen for the combination of visual and subtitles.
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So do you grab them previsionally, thinking "Oh, this one will be perfect for when the players realise that they can cheese Itachi by hiding behind a wave of biosealing monsters only weak to fire," or is it more of a vibes thing?

EDIT: I shouldn't have mentioned the cheesing strat, replaced it with an alternate that as far as the playerbase knows might work but doesn't necessarily reflect his actual weaknesses crunch-side
 
Lysbeth Succubus said:
So do you grab them previsionally, thinking "Oh, this one will be perfect for when the players realise that they can cheese Itachi by hiding behind a wave of biosealing monsters only weak to fire," or is it more of a vibes thing?

EDIT: I shouldn't have mentioned the cheesing strat, replaced it with an alternate that as far as the playerbase knows might work but doesn't necessarily reflect his actual weaknesses crunch-side
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Both. More often, I think "this looks amazing; I will surely find an opportunity to use it someday", unrelatedly to MfD (if you count recording humorous quotes, I have been doing things like this for 25 years), but occasionally one will be obviously perfect for the quest and I just need to find the right way to present it.
 
eaglejarl said:
In general, metagaming isn't going to work.
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Thank you for the answers; since asking those questions I learned via the Discord that you guys would prefer that we not try to metagame stuff like Gamma HOWS or such. That renders most of the questions moot, since I was trying to figure out whether Hazopilot would get himself killed while researching those things. Still, thank you for the answers.
 
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Interlude: Dreaming of Home
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    • Interlude: Dreaming of Home​

    Someone passed Yuno a bowl of rice. A pair of chopsticks stuck out of it, vertically. Yuno took it.

    "Welcome home, Yuno," Grandfather said, without feeling, doing nothing but stating a fact. The way he did if their paths crossed the day she came back from a hunt.

    "I have returned, Grandfather," Yuno said, twisting her hand in the sign of the closed circle. She placed the bowl on the red tablecloth in front of her, inside Grandfather's shadow. Everything was inside Grandfather's shadow.

    If Grandfather's shadow was too big, it was because Yuno was so little. Yes, now she remembered. This wasn't when she came back from a hunt. This was when Daddy had just died, and Grandfather was still deciding whether he loved her.

    That made sense. Inside Yuno, Daddy had always just died, though these days she was very good at forgetting it. But you weren't allowed to forget things at home, where you were always surrounded by people who remembered.

    "You're holding your chopsticks wrong," Grandfather observed with a scowl of distaste. "Is nothing your parents taught you worthy of the Kannagi? Hold them like that and the anima will drain away before it reaches your mouth."

    Actually, Yuno wasn't holding them at all. Every time she tried, they slipped through her fingers. Finally, she tied them in place with a length of ribbon, and that worked.

    "I don't hold my chopsticks the way Daddy taught me anymore," she corrected him. "This is the Fire Country way. You have to hold them like this or people look at you like you're a barbarian. I tried explaining about anima at first, but that was even worse."

    "It sounds like a terrible place," Azai Shūsuke told her. "I hope it was worth betraying Akio's teachings and your entire people for." He stood up from his seat, revealing the enormous gash down the front of his ceremonial robe, lined in bright red like a ward against the One Who Silently Hastens the Cycle.

    "You're not here," Yuno said accusingly. "I killed you. I killed you very much." Just looking at him brought back the memory, sent sticky, visceral joy pouring in a torrent from his sternum through her entire body.

    "You killed us all," the High Priest said, walking over to the window, hands folded behind him in a public speech posture. "I was going to make Isan strong. Cruel, maybe, and not what you were hoping for, but I had a plan. And what did you do? You danced on Takahashi's strings. You pulled Isan into a war that was none of our concern and got your fellow descendants of Akio killed on impure soil for people who treat our wisdom as comedy. Then you let Leaf's enemies massacre us for it."

    He threw the window open. On the other side, beneath an ashen sky, there were only ruins. The Kannagi compound, reduced to shards of broken steel. The Inoue, a bonfire of ragged scriptures. Tapirs lay in the streets, puddles of flesh and bone struggling to take their last breaths. Not a single human body. Nobody she could kill. Nobody she could save.

    Yuno ran out, beneath the ashen sky of Leaf, to where Hyūga Hiashi waited for her.

    "In answer to the question," he said coolly, "no, it was most certainly not worth it. I permitted you to join us. I offered you a new home in place of the one you abandoned. But once a foreigner, always a foreigner. At least I didn't live to see how you repaid my kindness."

    Below, easily visible from the Hokage Monument, Leaf burned.

    "I-I didn't do anything! Yuno exclaimed. "All I did was leave!"

    "Your personal culpability is limited," the Sixth Hokage conceded. "The other foreigners made much greater contributions to Leaf, and so did much more damage with their betrayals."

    There was only a deep, dark chasm where the Nara compound should have been. Chakra beasts swarmed the KEI headquarters outside the village walls, tearing apart whoever they found. The General Hospital had transformed into a writhing mass of disease spirits, constantly fed by unsent souls rising from a festering mass of body parts, while in the background, a chorus of helpless wailing rose from a thousand distant villages.

    "Uplift," the Hokage said sardonically. "All those speeches about how we were doomed to extinction without you, right before you abandoned us to our fate."

    "It's not my fault!" Yuno pleaded. "Hazō and the others are the people who understand Uplift! If they say this way is better, how am I supposed to say they're wrong?"

    "You never tried to grasp the big picture," the Hokage agreed. "Considering your pitiful intellect, perhaps it was even humility rather than laziness. Forget the world, then. Let's talk about you."

    The Hokage took off his hat, and Yuno saw far away, with the inescapable accuracy of the Byakugan.

    Yuki, only the top half. Shichi, empty in a pool of his own blood. Countless pieces of Inuzuka and Yatsuzakimaru, intermixed. Team after team, bodies arranged in formations they'd practised together.

    "You killed them all. Personally, in fact."

    They'd come after Yuno, the betrayer, out of duty or out of pain, and Yuno was a survivor. Until one of them was finally stronger, it would end this way every time.

    "Of course, not everything you kill is life," the Hokage said. "You had more pupils than you'd ever expected. I wonder what has become of their hearts, to see their beloved Gōketsu-sensei spit on the Will of Fire? Once a missing-nin, always a missing-nin, I should have said. Why did you even bother making all those bonds to begin with?"

    The Hokage led her to the Hokage Tower, the most important place in Leaf. Through those gates lay the Bloody Cleaver Style dojo, but the dojo was only a smouldering wreck of what should have been. Yuno couldn't even read the sign.

    "Even your dream shared their fate," the Hokage commented. "Not worth much considering how easily you left it behind, is it? I wonder how Fujisawa Miyuki feels about you breaking your promise."

    "I don't," said the Great Prophet with a lazy smirk, leaning against the entrance, Sanjin casually pinning Fujisawa's head to the dojo sign. At his feet, a notebook page was completely black.

    "It doesn't take the Pangolin Summoner to know what happened to Fujisawa after ya abandoned her. Now, fightin' for yer friends ain't exactly Jashinist style, but at the end of the day, blood is blood is blood. Thus spake me. Reckon she'd still be alive if ya stayed behind to protect ner?"

    "I-I don't have to listen to you!" Yuno insisted. "You ran!"

    But the Great Prophet's grin only got wider.

    "Yeah, I ran. And that was just from the Eighth and a bunch of jōnin. Imagine if Leaf stopped bein' such pussies and got him, Tsunade, and Orochimaru together, plus their Dragon-killin' tricks. That's what it means to fight. It's what Lord Jashin teaches, and ya don't need no Great Prophet to tell ya that. But no, ya let them take the Gōketsu, Leaf's lump of crazy firepower, and run as far as they could. What're ya fightin' now, otters? Do ya think that sacrifice'll save Fujisawa, assumin' it's not already too late?"

    "Hazō has his reasons," Yuno said feebly. "He's a genius, and he says this is how we win in the end."

    "And ya goin' to pretend ya had the teeniest inklin' of that when ya went missin'?" the Great Prophet asked, ascending straight up on his skywalkers. Yuno could only follow him.

    "Or did ya just throw it all away because it was the only way to stay with Noburi?"

    Yuno couldn't speak. She tried, but nothing came out.

    "Once Hazō ordered it, he was goin'. Ya know it, I know it, the freakin' cat(?) knows it. And yer still nothin' without him. Just a crazy little monster. Only…"

    The Great Prophet pointed down, to the magic pool beneath them. Yuno watched as the water turned crimson, then swelled, then swelled again, then overflowed. The flood kept spreading without end, filling the cave, drowning the desert, drowning the world.

    "There ain't room in that barrel for all the blood ya bring with ya. Ya got by in the civilised world somehow, but out here, there's nothin' left but ya true self. Nothin' left for ya to do but be ya true self, whether it's to beasts or hunter-nin or Akatsuki."

    "That's not true! It's not!"

    The Great Prophet gave her a smile of twisted kindness and lifted up his finger. The blood followed, pouring upwards in a ribbon, the only colour in a world of grey.

    "Ya kill things, hopin' it'll make yer family love ya. That's where ya begin and end."

    The red ribbon twisted, into a path, into a figure-of-eight, into a tablecloth for a feast that would never fill.

    Lord Jashin passed Yuno a bowl of rice. A pair of chopsticks stuck out of it, vertically. Yuno took it.

    "Welcome home, Yuno," Grandfather said, without feeling, doing nothing but stating a fact.

    -o-​

    Voting is closed.
     
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    • Wow. That's probably the most actually dream-like dream chapter I've read in my life... and it's an interlude in a ~decade long, 10k+ page forum quest I'll never get any of my IRL friends to read. That's not even getting into the other Velorien writing touches that I'm already used to - the cultural symbolism, the depth of the non-POV characters, getting hit with that feeling of "Oh wow, that is something they'd feel/do/say" every couple of paragraphs. Just incredible stuff, as always.
     
    Velorien said:
    He stood up from his seat, revealing the enormous gash down the front of his ceremonial robe, lined in bright red like a ward against the One Who Silently Hastens the Cycle.
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    If anyone's trying to guess which eldritch entity this line refers to, note that Jashin's tongue was cut out in a mythological fight against the Sage of Six Paths. He is silent, he obviously hastens the cycle, and an enormous bloody gash is exactly his kind of symbology.
     
    absoluteblack said:
    Wow. That's probably the most actually dream-like dream chapter I've read in my life...
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    This was my specific objective in writing this (other than Yuno-related stuff). It's always been a pet peeve of mine how dreams in fiction are nothing like dreams in reality (though admittedly I've been guilty of the same sin myself, especially when a dream is just an excuse to play with an AU).
     
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