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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Noumero said:
Hazou and Kagome have studied rifts, and presumably have some basic theory of them down. If Hazou thinks a specific idea generalizes to rifts, yes, I would take that as decent evidence that it indeed generalizes to rifts.
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Yeah, no I don't think they do.

Even if they did, how do you know that your cookie cutter rune doesn't do something unexpected, like accidentally cut the connection between Naraka and the EN when it makes the spatial elision?

There are too many unknown unknowns here for me to be comfortable betting that our untested rune will 100% work flawlessly without ever being tested on a rift. How many prototypes work perfectly with nothing unexpected happening? Let's be Bayesian about this.

EDIT: Missed your edit

Noumero said:
Edit: I mean, picture that. Suppose that the Hazoupilot and Kagome indeed feel fairly confident that this idea would work. Suppose we develop the rune and go try to apply it to the rift. Do you imagine that we're suddenly startled to realize that it doesn't work, despite their previous confidence? I can imagine it, but this feels really improbable.

If we want more security, we could go try it on the bladehorrors rift after we've developed it.
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If they're confident it will work, sure. I just very much mega doubt they will be confident.

Happy to test the idea on the bladehorror rift, but I'd rather just research Rift Runes on it if we're doing that. Since we're kinda locked out of Iron until things cool off some.
 
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We chatted with Kagome about this 200-300 chapters ago, but my takeaway on the rift stuff was that cooking one up is not necessarily difficult, but that cooking one up specifically linked to a particular target was titanically difficult.

If we absolutely need a rift to test rift-related runes on.... well, we can try to just make one and it seems like that isn't insanely difficult (though probably moderately dangerous). Needs must when the devil drives.
 
Would Storage Seals count as rifts? Opening up a Rift to a specific part of the Out to store/access stuff? We know that, most of the time, a damages storage seal just dumps its contents into the Out (even Mari, a seasoned veteran jonin thought this was the case 100% of the time), but Kagome warns that there's still a small chance for a sealing failure.

Older storage seals take a longer to unseal their contents... we could examine one with our various sensor seals as it unseals stuff, to see if a storage seal is applicable to Rift work.

I don't think it will, but there's enough narrative grounding that it should warrant a quick check, just in case. A SC could easily do it, offscreen.
 
Sir Stompy said:
Even if they did, how do you know that your cookie cutter rune doesn't do something unexpected, like accidentally cut the connection between Naraka and the EN when it makes the spatial elision?
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This is a concern, yes. It seems to me that space-manipulation and "dimensionalism" are separate disciplines, and that manipulating the space around the rift's EN aperture shouldn't have any interaction with the rift's inter-Path dimensional tunnel, especially if we specifically restrict the space-manipulating rune to only affect the three dimensions of the Human Path. But it's possible that all six Paths are embedded in the same space with some weird geometry (rather than each Path being its own, mostly isolated universe), such that warping the space around the rune might affect the connection to the afterlife. Or perhaps the rift is spatially anchored relative to some "global" coordinates, such that local space-warping isn't going to move it.

Whether we should pursue it ultimately does rely on Hazou and Kagome deciding whether it'd work. I'm pointing out that if we can't make rift-creating runes, we still have some options to explore.

Left-Hand Mutant said:
Which this makes intuitive sense to me, I think the QMs have said that we need to be able to test the runes(by having an actual rift) on each infusion day in order to advance our research.
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That's for runes specifically for moving rifts. By analogy, if we want to develop a rune that kills a person by teleporting out their nervous system, we indeed need to have people to experiment on. But if we want a rune that kills a person by creating an explosion, access to people isn't necessary: we could test it on trees and rocks, and be confident its destructive effect would generalize to people.

RandomOTP said:
Would Storage Seals count as rifts? Opening up a Rift to a specific part of the Out to store/access stuff? We know that, most of the time, a damages storage seal just dumps its contents into the Out (even Mari, a seasoned veteran jonin thought this was the case 100% of the time), but Kagome warns that there's still a small chance for a sealing failure.
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One important disanalogy between storage seals and rifts is that the "rifts" created by storage seals are anchored to a chakra construct on a piece of paper, not to a chakra construct anchored to space.
 
Looking back at the timeline, it took Orochimaru about two months to make his trio of rift-moving seals.

When Oro started his research, Hazou had an effective PS 40, so I'd peg Oro as starting this research at effective PS 30, but advancing to effective PS 40 before he finished research.

given Hazou's current effective PS of 61, I suspect we can recreate Orochimaru's rift-movers in a month or less. Plus the time it takes us to make our own rift for test purposes.

Edit: Unless Oro developed his three runes in parallel rather than as a chain.
That would be a mix of good new(those are low DCs we can annihilate with PS 61), and bad news(we don't have the chakra to parallelize three runes at once). I'm unclear if this would bring my research time estimate up or down.
 
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Left-Hand Mutant said:
it took Orochimaru about two months to make his trio of rift-moving seals.
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Note that we didn't get actual notes from Orochimaru or any other indication he actually finished these. Hazou got a quick bulletpoints-level summary of what Naruto could weasel out of Orochimaru with respect to them.

I also don't think the QMs really model most of these high-level research characters as being as obsessive-compulsively safety focused as we are when it comes to research safety. "I think that maybe I can do this" is probably a few seconds worth of thought and a judgement call away from either (temporary) project abandonment or "I am going to succeed at this." from Orochimaru or Sasori's[1] perspectives. Jiraiya's research safety protocol was "I'll beat the shit out of any problems or dodge realllly good, YOLO bitches!" for instance.

That said I think Oro's Biosealing stat prolly does some heavy lifting for him and he prolly made use of Shadow Clones while he could. We could ask Noburi how often he stopped by to get refills while we were gone?

[1] Sasori is like mandated-by-magic to be neurodivergent in ways that make him good at innovating existing things he has some sort of special focus on and terrible at doing anything creative outside of that. Seems reasonable to me he might be uniquely handicapped outside of the "biosealing and puppets" domain of expertise wrt research speed.
 
Has there been any discussion about trying to design any runes that could generate bonus XP? Maybe something that imitates the YTJ to get us that resolve boost? Or a rune that ups gravity for some bonus XP to physical skills?
 
MMKII said:
[1] Sasori is like mandated-by-magic to be neurodivergent in ways that make him good at innovating existing things he has some sort of special focus on and terrible at doing anything creative outside of that. Seems reasonable to me he might be uniquely handicapped outside of the "biosealing and puppets" domain of expertise wrt research speed.
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NB: Orochimaru noted that Sasori's bloodline-induced limitations were weaker compared to his peers (IMO from the circumstances of his birth) so he's likely to be less-than-terrible at out-of-the-box thinking. OTOH it also likely means that he's not as good at innovating as one would expect from a Yodomi.
 
MMKII said:
We chatted with Kagome about this 200-300 chapters ago, but my takeaway on the rift stuff was that cooking one up is not necessarily difficult, but that cooking one up specifically linked to a particular target was titanically difficult.

If we absolutely need a rift to test rift-related runes on.... well, we can try to just make one and it seems like that isn't insanely difficult (though probably moderately dangerous). Needs must when the devil drives.
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A somewhat longer shot, but if that doesn't work for some reason we could see if anyone knows the site of a defunct seal research facility - rifts seems to not be too rare as a type of seal failure, and a rift scar might last indefinitely.


Left-Hand Mutant said:
given Hazou's current effective PS of 61, I suspect we can recreate Orochimaru's rift-movers in a month or less. Plus the time it takes us to make our own rift for test purposes.
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My biggest concern here is that once we recreate them they might turn out to not suit our use case in some unanticipated manner (e.g. moves the rift too slowly, or not far enough, or only works on an opened rift, not a rift scar). If we're not sticking as closely to Oro's ideas, this is less likely to be an issue, but we might make slower progress overall.
But I still think the plan is good overall and worth pursuing.
 
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Oneiros said:
Has there been any discussion about trying to design any runes that could generate bonus XP? Maybe something that imitates the YTJ to get us that resolve boost? Or a rune that ups gravity for some bonus XP to physical skills?
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There's a Gravity Rune in the current log of prep days, should hopefully get an answer for that one on Thursday. The Temporal Runes also get us more XP, objectively if not subjectively.
 
Left-Hand Mutant said:
given Hazou's current effective PS of 61, I suspect we can recreate Orochimaru's rift-movers in a month or less. Plus the time it takes us to make our own rift for test purposes.

Edit: Unless Oro developed his three runes in parallel rather than as a chain.
That would be a mix of good new(those are low DCs we can annihilate with PS 61), and bad news(we don't have the chakra to parallelize three runes at once). I'm unclear if this would bring my research time estimate up or down.
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OrthernLight said:
My biggest concern here is that once we recreate them they might turn out to not suit our use case in some unanticipated manner (e.g. moves the rift too slowly, or not far enough, or only works on an opened rift, not a rift scar). If we're not sticking as closely to Oro's ideas, this is less likely to be an issue, but we might make slower progress overall.
But I still think the plan is good overall and worth pursuing.
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Yeah, on reflection, I think Orochimaru was optimising his runes to take advantage of Shadow clone.
He split the project into three easier aspects, and researched each aspect in parallel, forgoing veterancy, because he had chakra to spare.

We probably want to solve the issue differently.


brainstorming some options. not nessicarialy all good options, just getting ideas flowing:
  • Make a "dimensional GPS" rune/graphoseal that can record the location of the path it's on. Latter, we make an "open a rift to the specified path" rune
  • A giant etheric/dimensional explosion or other "thrust" source that can launch the rift scar like shrapnel, and another "barrel" rune that focuses the blast and controls the direction.
    • Similar to Oro's approach, but instead of carefully laying down a psudo-magnetic railway, we just shoot it out of a fucking cannon.
  • Don't actually bother to move the rune very far. Do the bare minimum to just ditch it underground a km or two from the original rift site, and it's basically impossible to find.
    • We'll tunnel back for it later when we have better runes.
  • Pair a "Rift Holder" rune with a space stretch rune, so that "walking pace" in distorted space still lets us move pretty fast(while dragging runes)
  • Make a "Rift Holder" rune with no/less runic drag, that we can just carry away with us.
    • Seems like the most promising/most likely to be easy. Once we have a rift-maker, I'd start here for rift-moving.
 
Left-Hand Mutant said:
  • Make a "Rift Holder" rune with no/less runic drag, that we can just carry away with us.
    • Seems like the most promising/most likely to be easy. Once we have a rift-maker, I'd start here for rift-moving.
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Runic drag seems incredibly difficult to overcome, recall that we tried to do a trivial rune without it and completely failed. I don't see this as remotely likely.

Oro's runes seem fine to me. Far better than trying to move the rift 1" per minute lol.
 
Sir Stompy said:
Runic drag seems incredibly difficult to overcome, recall that we tried to do a trivial rune without it and completely failed. I don't see this as remotely likely.

Oro's runes seem fine to me. Far better than trying to move the rift 1" per minute lol.
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Oh? I'd thought the "Heteronormitive Explosive Rune" was feasible for us, but I must have misremembered.

...where's the link to the player spreadsheet of Rune DC estimates?
 
Left-Hand Mutant said:
Oh? I'd thought the "Heteronormitive Explosive Rune" was feasible for us, but I must have misremembered.

...where's the link to the player spreadsheet of Rune DC estimates?
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It's also in the "Seal documents" informational post, and indeed it's not up to date; but yes, Portable Explosive turned out to be beyond our capabilities, which in this context probably means impossible.
 
coldcutconvict said:
If coils generate chakra by generating an energy gradient, makes sense that chakra construct coils, being made of chakra, could not make a gradient the same way. Like cell walls made of salt. Stronger coils generate a grainier gradient. Maybe hacking clones to be cast incorporating physical coil substitutes could let them regenerate on their own.
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Previous effects I can recall offhand which had the possibility of both "chakra construct material" and "real material" outcomes seemed to depend on building from an environment where the real material could have existed naturally. So, to make a variant of Shadow Clone which produces non-chakra-construct chakra coils, we'd need to first set up an environment where such coils could survive. Sounds like a job for biosealing.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, though, how about trying to hack a jutsu which transforms a targeted stalk of Snake Rice into a clone of the user? Doesn't even necessarily need to be a full mind emulation shadow clone, just something to establish proof-of-concept on clones capable of regenerating chakra independently.
 
OrthernLight said:
We'd have to solve the activation delay that explosive runes have, though - IIRC it was about 30s but not totally consistent.
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Could work out some sort of MARS-like crosslinking. Maybe have each of them send a "hello" ping to all the other nearby remote explosives when their own 30s countdown starts, then a "ready" ping when fully charged, and simply hold the charge, delaying detonation, until they hear at least as many "readys" as they heard recent "hellos."
A whole barrage set up that way effectively uses the longest single delay among any of the components, and a clever saboteur could find ways to thwart it by, say, faking an extra "hello" with a paper seal... but when it works, all of them will detonate simultaneously in the same instant the last one becomes ready. Shouldn't require much in the way of tricky internal logic gates - core is just a single variable incrementing up and down like an abacus, and being measured against a fixed go / no-go threshold. Said threshold is also conveniently close to the initial default value.
 
strange_person said:
Could work out some sort of MARS-like crosslinking. Maybe have each of them send a "hello" ping to all the other nearby remote explosives when their own 30s countdown starts, then a "ready" ping when fully charged, and simply hold the charge, delaying detonation, until they hear at least as many "readys" as they heard recent "hellos."
A whole barrage set up that way effectively uses the longest single delay among any of the components, and a clever saboteur could find ways to thwart it by, say, faking an extra "hello" with a paper seal... but when it works, all of them will detonate simultaneously in the same instant the last one becomes ready. Shouldn't require much in the way of tricky internal logic gates - core is just a single variable incrementing up and down like an abacus, and being measured against a fixed go / no-go threshold. Said threshold is also conveniently close to the initial default value.
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The ROI on an explosive barrage is not good enough to dump all this effort into it. One attack at TN 100 from 25 runes is not nothing, but we can do much, much better with other runes. Just use one explosive, and sensory and observation runes to drop it directly on the Akatsuki members in question.

Still one TN 100 attack, but it uses 3 runes instead of 25. Same philosophy as PGMs.
 
Sir Stompy said:
The ROI on an explosive barrage is not good enough to dump all this effort into it. One attack at TN 100 from 25 runes is not nothing, but we can do much, much better with other runes. Just use one explosive, and sensory and observation runes to drop it directly on the Akatsuki members in question.

Still one TN 100 attack, but it uses 3 runes instead of 25. Same philosophy as PGMs.
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How much effort are you thinking my proposal would take? I was imagining it as merely a slightly more complicated fuze, almost trivial compared to the challenge of making remote explosives work at all. I'm certainly not opposed to more precise targeting, but it ought to be possible to do some of both. If we know which zone they're in AND crack the variable-delay problem, could hit that one spot with several independent TN 100 attacks all before they get a turn, which seems far more likely to successfully finish the job.
Then there's the question of diminishing returns. If our target has some S-rank stealth / misdirection trick which beats our detector rune, ten or a hundred more of the same detector probably won't do much solve that problem. Enough explosives still can, simply by distributing them across all the volume where the target might be hiding, especially if those blasts are all hitting at exactly the same time so there's no way to thread a zigzagging path between them.
 
strange_person said:
Previous effects I can recall offhand which had the possibility of both "chakra construct material" and "real material" outcomes seemed to depend on building from an environment where the real material could have existed naturally. So, to make a variant of Shadow Clone which produces non-chakra-construct chakra coils, we'd need to first set up an environment where such coils could survive. Sounds like a job for biosealing.

Rather than reinventing the wheel, though, how about trying to hack a jutsu which transforms a targeted stalk of Snake Rice into a clone of the user? Doesn't even necessarily need to be a full mind emulation shadow clone, just something to establish proof-of-concept on clones capable of regenerating chakra independently.
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Clones with coils not too different from zombies Arikada biosealed. Think human chakra systems would be most compatible with human clones. Feels ghastly but, never returned those Squirrel-nin bodies...

Disorganized thoughts.
  • Clone regen could be impossible if regen needs a soul.
    • Thing that manifests your afterlife copy.
  • Ninja eat food to make chakra.
    • Akimichi burn fat stores for more chakra.
    • Clones would need to eat + probably regen less than human bodies.
  • SC hours are limited by resolve.
    • Elemental clones last 10 minutes.
  • Clones are annoying to travel with. More seals used or more tracks.
    • Clones on 7th Path dispel when you leave.
How much chakra would the conductor rune need to pay out to pay for crafting cost?
 
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