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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Left-Hand Mutant said:
The QMs have told us that you need direct rift access to do rift research, so that suggests that Sasori is one-site every infusion day, at minimum.
Maybe Sasori is using different rift elsewhere, but my money's on the O'zu rift site.
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I wouldn't bet on them being this stupid.

You're suggesting that we make the rift theft look like a sealing failure, because you're assuming that Sasori regularly does infusions at the rift site, which means it's plausible that he causes a sealing failure and destroys the rift. If Sasori is truly doing infusions at the rift site, then he is truly constantly risking causing a rift-destroying onsite sealing failure! If the scenario you want to deceive them into believing is something that might actually happen, then it is something that might actually happen, which means the Akatsuki would need to be morons who are constantly risking destroying the afterlife rift.

I don't believe Sasori is doing any infusions near the afterlife rift, precisely because he doesn't want to destroy it via an accidental sealing failure. He's using a different rift. Which means "Sasori accidentally caused a rift-destroying sealing failure" is not plausible.

Shrooms said:
Eh we kinda brought this up already in the strategy meeting before we left Leaf, the strategists don't think any of them would stay in one location for so long outside of hidden rain, because it makes them an easier target to be sitting in a predictable location.
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Hmm.
Paperclipped said:
"Naturally, they hate to be predictable since that's how you get killed. Still, Akatsuki sightings are inherently noteworthy, so we have a bit of info. Sasori and Konan spend most of their time in Rain. Usually there's two pairs out and about and one of the Akatsuki hanging out with the home squad, but with their numbers reduced and Sasori doing critical research, I'd guess four Akatsuki in Rain and two traveling. We can't predict where the roaming pair goes… except! Here, Hidan visits his Jashinist temples occasionally. If we wanted to set a trap, we could do it at one of these locations."

She quickly unfolded a map with some marked locations. O'uzu Island was among them, as well vaguely-marked locations in the southern isles and the eastern continent.

"Sasori is still the highest-value target," Hazō said. "And assuming he follows my plan, he'll need to visit the O'uzu Rift at some point to gather more data. He may travel with Hidan so that Hidan can visit his temple at the same time. We could ambush them then. Maybe even loop in Orochimaru, who knows their weaknesses."

"We cannot predict the timing of the visit," Uchiha said. "We cannot leave someone at O'uzu ready to leave for Leaf at the first sign of Akatsuki even if we knew they wouldn't be caught, because the round-trip time is at least a week and a half. If we wanted to ambush them on a trip of similar length to the one you took me on, Hazō, we'd need to leave our S-rank-killing forces camped out on O'uzu indefinitely. That is untenable. An ambush elsewhere, where the assassination target is maybe not present and the location is unknown? Completely unworkable."
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Unless you're talking about a different discussion, they aren't actually evaluating the possibility that the Akatsuki may be there to guard the rift. And this was before we, a team of Summoners with an elite jounin that know about the rift, went missing. We're collectively an S-rank threat; they know that a bunch of Jashinist won't be enough to prevent us from destroying the rift if we were inclined to do so.

I think it's very likely there's a pair of them there.
 
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Noumero said:
Unless you're talking about a different discussion, they aren't actually evaluating the possibility that the Akatsuki may be there to guard the rift. And this was before we, a team of Summoners with an elite jounin that know about the rift, went missing. We're collectively an S-rank threat; they know that a bunch of Jashinist won't be enough to prevent us from destroying the rift if we were inclined to do so.
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At least thus far we have been greatly underestimated as a group, whether within Leaf or outside it. If that golem Interlude is to be believed, Hidan is the only one with much interest in our group, the others do not see us as a risk (I don't know why tho...)

Again, I'll agree that we should just assume worst case scenario and prepare for at least a couple of them to be there, but I do not think it's the most likely scenario. For whatever reason people have the don't-take-us-seriously brainworms but this time it's in our favor
 
RandomOTP said:
Once we have Mednin, should we make a No Sleep Rune? We know that we need medical stats to make seals and runes that affect the biology (such as the Sterilization Seal and the Chakra Pool Rune), which are different than bioseals, which use biology as a medium.

With Mednin and Runecrafting, we should be able to make a No Sleep Rune, giving us even more hours per day to do stuff.
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I think this is probably overly optimistic. Runes can make big effects; but I don't think we have much evidence that they're better at complex effects than seals. And the fact that no one seems to have invented a Healing Seal - even though such a thing would be incredibly useful for ninja on missions and even though Orochimaru spent years in Leaf with advanced medical skills, advanced sealing skills, a drive to help people, and the ability to think clearly about how best to do that - suggests to me that it's, if not impossible, at least extremely difficult. Bioseals seem to be able to do hugely complicated biological effects, but I don't think we know a single example of a paper seal that interacts with biology in any way at all. Maybe it's possible and we just haven't heard of it - there are seals that can do moderately complex chemical things, like UGLSP or the Dog Seal - but I wouldn't bet on it.

And runes probably wouldn't make this easier, because reducing sleep is not something that can be solved by throwing more power at it. We don't fully understand what sleep does; but having to be inactive and unalert for hours - or at reduced capacity, in the case of unihemispheric sleep - is such a huge fitness cost that the fact that we're not aware of a single example of an animal with a non-rudimentary brain that doesn't sleep suggests that doing away with it is very very difficult. We have some reason to think that even artificial neural networks may benefit enormously from a sleeplike phase (see Sleep-like unsupervised replay reduces catastrophic forgetting in artificial neural networks - Nature Communications, Sleep-like unsupervised replay reduces catastrophic forgetting in artificial neural networks), and it's not a huge leap to hypothesize that a sleep-like phase might be a fundamental requirement for any broad-scope learning system based on neural nets. Bioseals - evidently - can get around that, but bioseals have been seen to make many other highly complex modifications to living systems; we have no similar precedent for seals, and IMO no particular reason to think runes will do better.
 
Kyreneryk said:
I think this is probably overly optimistic. Runes can make big effects; but I don't think we have much evidence that they're better at complex effects than seals
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To be fair, I think we've never prep-dayed any actually complex effects. I've been proposing genjutsu and antimeme runes, but we haven't tried them.

I expect you're right, though. "Complex effects" is probably Minatosealing's domain.
 
Kyreneryk said:
I think this is probably overly optimistic [...]
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For the matter of complexity, I have to disagree. We have runes that speed up time, itself, without ripping the fabric of spacetime to shreds. We have paper seals that fold space, and make a time-stopped hammerspace. We have runes that can compress space without affecting the passage of time within that space. Those sound like pretty complex effects.

I think it's more likely just a matter of Hazou having the secondary requisite knowledge (medicals) to make the rune or seal do medical stuff.

And "why haven't we seen this done before" is a barrier that doesn't apply to Runecrafting. The QMs, themselves, have explicitly mentioned this as a feather in runecrafting's cap that mundane paper sealing simply doesn't have.

Further, just because we haven't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist (though I agree that normal, paper sealing, probably isn't enough to make a Sleep Reduction Seal).

Keep in mind that research sealmasters ninja are Very, Very Rare, and have a higher death rate than the average combat ninja... and most combat ninja die in their early teens as genin.

Even then, add in the fact that so many institutional secrets are kept secret by one or two people (and thus, very vulnerable to being lost via the meatgrinder, as we've seen via the Collapse in Leaf), on top of the fact that Ninja Culture means Keeping Your Shit Secret... I don't think "we haven't seen it" is a as big a barrier to entry as you say.

And, as an aside, even if Hazou's unable to make a "You Are Literally Immune to Sleep" Rune, he might be able to make a "You Need 3hrs Less Sleep Every Night" Rune, which would give us an extra training block's worth of XP, scalable under a TR rune.
 
RandomOTP said:
For the matter of complexity, I have to disagree. We have runes that speed up time, itself, without ripping the fabric of spacetime to shreds. We have paper seals that fold space, and make a time-stopped hammerspace. We have runes that can compress space without affecting the passage of time within that space. Those sound like pretty complex effects.

I think it's more likely just a matter of Hazou having the secondary requisite knowledge (medicals) to make the rune or seal do medical stuff.

And "why haven't we seen this done before" is a barrier that doesn't apply to Runecrafting. The QMs, themselves, have explicitly mentioned this as a feather in runecrafting's cap that mundane paper sealing simply doesn't have.

Further, just because we haven't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist (though I agree that normal, paper sealing, probably isn't enough to make a Sleep Reduction Seal).

Keep in mind that research sealmasters ninja are Very, Very Rare, and have a higher death rate than the average combat ninja... and most combat ninja die in their early teens as genin.

Even then, add in the fact that so many institutional secrets are kept secret by one or two people (and thus, very vulnerable to being lost via the meatgrinder, as we've seen via the Collapse in Leaf), on top of the fact that Ninja Culture means Keeping Your Shit Secret... I don't think "we haven't seen it" is a as big a barrier to entry as you say.

And, as an aside, even if Hazou's unable to make a "You Are Literally Immune to Sleep" Rune, he might be able to make a "You Need 3hrs Less Sleep Every Night" Rune, which would give us an extra training block's worth of XP, scalable under a TR rune.
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Do we expect not needing sleep to increase XP base rate? That seems overly optimistic to me. I was imagining we're get a few more training blocks to allocate -- a modest benefit.
 
Sir Stompy said:
Do we expect not needing sleep to increase XP base rate? That seems overly optimistic to me. I was imagining we're get a few more training blocks to allocate -- a modest benefit.
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Prooooobably not base rate but it means, if nothing else, more time to scribe a billion seals that we need (MARS, skywalkers, etc.) Also additional blocks for note reading, though this mostly helps Kagome.
 
Shrooms said:
Prooooobably not base rate but it means, if nothing else, more time to scribe a billion seals that we need (MARS, skywalkers, etc.) Also additional blocks for note reading, though this mostly helps Kagome.
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The marginal benefit is exceedingly low then. Since going from 2 free blocks to 5 means and increase from 21 total blocks to 24, when we're already running low on notes I'm not sure I see the point.
 
Sir Stompy said:
The marginal benefit is exceedingly low then. Since going from 2 free blocks to 5 means and increase from 21 total blocks to 24, when we're already running low on notes I'm not sure I see the point.
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Once we're no longer Chakra-bound for FOOM, more training blocks would mean more XP. We know that Noburi and Kagome are (maybe) going to get SC enough to eat through notes (Kagome likely has Sealing Notes left on the table, and we've discussed making Noburi a THer), and this would allow them to do so at an increased rate.
 
Noumero said:
To be fair, I think we've never prep-dayed any actually complex effects. I've been proposing genjutsu and antimeme runes, but we haven't tried them.

I expect you're right, though. "Complex effects" is probably Minatosealing's domain.
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We tried a substrate-producing rune, back at eff. PS 43, and it was beyond our capabilities at the time. That was something where we know a technique that can do it, even if we haven't levelled it high enough.

That said, I'm not arguing that runes can't do anything that seals can do, and we've seen some pretty complex seal effects. I'm just saying that I wouldn't expect runes to be capable of all that much more complexity than seals.

RandomOTP said:
For the matter of complexity, I have to disagree. We have runes that speed up time, itself, without ripping the fabric of spacetime to shreds. We have paper seals that fold space, and make a time-stopped hammerspace. We have runes that can compress space without affecting the passage of time within that space. Those sound like pretty complex effects.

I think it's more likely just a matter of Hazou having the secondary requisite knowledge (medicals) to make the rune or seal do medical stuff.
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I've heard people say this before, and I don't agree with this viewpoint. It's not at all obvious to me why speeding up time should be a complex effect. Difficult, sure, because spacetime (at least in our universe) is stiff and requires a lot of energy to affect; but not complex. (Or at least, some complexity would be needed, but it's not obvious that it would need more complexity than used for effects producible by paper seals.) It might be as simple as stretching spacetime along the time axis. Does that compare to calculating exactly how to modify a network of nearly a hundred billion neurons, with a thousand or more connections per neuron, in order to substitute for sleep without affecting the target's mind and memories?

That said, I suppose if you can get chakra to do the heavy lifting - like, "apply medical chakra to the brain and tell it to substitute for sleep" - maybe that's more achievable, since chakra is clearly capable of silly amounts of calculation (for example, it permits mednin at all). Still, not optimistic. If we could do this I'd expect us to be able to make a substrate-extruding rune, and we weren't able to do that even with far more understanding of what substrate looks like (via Earthshaping) than we have for biology.

RandomOTP said:
And "why haven't we seen this done before" is a barrier that doesn't apply to Runecrafting. The QMs, themselves, have explicitly mentioned this as a feather in runecrafting's cap that mundane paper sealing simply doesn't have.
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My point is that I wouldn't expect runecrafting to be capable of much more complex effects than sealing. I'm arguing that if it were possible with runecrafting, I'd expect it also to be possible with paper sealing.

RandomOTP said:
Further, just because we haven't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist (though I agree that normal, paper sealing, probably isn't enough to make a Sleep Reduction Seal).

Keep in mind that research sealmasters ninja are Very, Very Rare, and have a higher death rate than the average combat ninja... and most combat ninja die in their early teens as genin.

Even then, add in the fact that so many institutional secrets are kept secret by one or two people (and thus, very vulnerable to being lost via the meatgrinder, as we've seen via the Collapse in Leaf), on top of the fact that Ninja Culture means Keeping Your Shit Secret... I don't think "we haven't seen it" is a as big a barrier to entry as you say.
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I take your point, but you haven't addressed the specific example I brought up, which is that Orochimaru before his exile was a high-level sealmaster, a high-level medic, highly motivated to help people, intelligent enough to think of something like a "promote healing of this wound" seal, and best friends with young Tsunade. The chain of logic goes as follows:
  • ATM, Leaf does not have access to a Healing Seal.
  • Orochimaru is known to have been willing to do complex sealing in order to help people (see Interlude: Shed Skins) and to have been intelligent enough to consider efficient solutions to problems like this (his work on disease spirits in that interlude, and his comments on agriculture in Chapter 642 edit: Chapter 656).
    • Therefore, Orochimaru probably considered the idea of a Healing Seal.
  • If Orochimaru had made a Healing Seal, he likely would have given the research notes on it to Tsunade, who would then have thrown her weight behind propagating the seal to other Leaf sealmasters.
    • In which case, it would be available in Leaf.
  • Therefore, Orochimaru did not make such a seal.
  • Since Orochimaru was a high-tier sealmaster and a high-tier medic even before his exile, the fact that Orochimaru didn't make such a seal suggests that it's either not possible, or difficult enough to have been beyond his reach.
It might, of course, have been beyond his reach at the time - plausibly he only had Sealing in a 50-slot before he lost interest in helping people - but not beyond ours now. It might even be worth doing a prep day to find out. But it's not encouraging.

RandomOTP said:
And, as an aside, even if Hazou's unable to make a "You Are Literally Immune to Sleep" Rune, he might be able to make a "You Need 3hrs Less Sleep Every Night" Rune, which would give us an extra training block's worth of XP, scalable under a TR rune.
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Maybe? Speeding up the existing process certainly seems more achievable than entirely replacing it, but again, we don't have a single example of seals affecting biology and it's not obvious why runes should be better at it.

I think before we try for a "Reduced Sleep Rune", we should try for a "Medic Rune" or something, which applies medical chakra (or equivalent) to people in its radius. That seems more likely to be possible and also very useful in its own right.
 
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RandomOTP said:
Once we're no longer Chakra-bound for FOOM, more training blocks would mean more XP. We know that Noburi and Kagome are (maybe) going to get SC enough to eat through notes (Kagome likely has Sealing Notes left on the table, and we've discussed making Noburi a THer), and this would allow them to do so at an increased rate.
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Additional blocks on Prime would affect base rate, not SC XP. If they did anything at all.

SCs are duration limited to 12 hours and we don't particularly benefit to extending that to 24 hours. Since if we have the chakra we are Resolve limited.

There is an extremely minor reduction in chakra cost from increasing the blocks per clone to 6. But still not remotely worth it.
 
Kyreneryk said:
I've heard people say this before, and I don't agree with this viewpoint.
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Kyreneryk said:
My point is that I wouldn't expect runecrafting to be capable of much more complex effects than sealing.
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Then we agree to disagree.

Kyreneryk said:
Therefore, Orochimaru did not make such a seal.
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This is a bit of a leap.

Or he did make it, and simply didn't share it. Orochimaru is a monstrous sociopath, even if he wasn't always a monstrous sociopath.

I don't find "we don't think Leaf doesn't have access to..." as convincing as you seem to. Leaf might have it, but restrict it to ANBU use. Or Leaf might've had it, pre-Collapse, but then lost in information in the Collapse, and no one living remembers (or, perhaps, wants to ask Orochimaru for another copy, hat in hand). Or maybe it's simply that Leaf doesn't have a sealmaster good enough to scribe the seal. Or a dozen other such reasons that also fit within the narrative.

Just because we haven't seen Leaf use it, doesn't mean that the seal is doesn't exist. And just because a seal doesn't exist, doesn't mean it's not possible (see: skywalkers).


Kyreneryk said:
we don't have a single example of seals affecting biology
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See all my previously stated reasons about I find "we haven't seen it" to be insufficient.

I suspect we will have to agree to disagree.

Sir Stompy said:
But still not remotely worth it.
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Shrooms said:
I didn't think SCs could get more than 3 blocks each, actually. They can read notes after that but not continue to train IIRC.
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I think they would be worth it to help Noburi and Kagome eat notes faster, but I'll admit that it's not a short-term priority. Kagome needs to learn/level SC, and Noburi needs to teach Hazou mednin and then finish his bloodline research.
 
Oro used biosealing to reduce the need for sleep, and it had substantial risk of side effects; this leads me to think that it's not an easy TH+mednin project or he'd've gone that route instead:

Velorien said:
"There is no ninjutsu with that specific function," Orochimaru said, "and the system is poorly-adapted for subtle body modifications to begin with. I do not…"

He paused, thinking. His eyes briefly ran up and down Hazō's body in a way that would have been embarrassing and alluring coming from an attractive woman, horribly creepy from anyone else, and in this instance made Hazō reflect on how easily a person could be disassembled with the right tools, which was not the kind of thought he ever wanted in his head.

"I do have a bioseal," Orochimaru decided. "It would require invasive surgery, and for you, it would have side effects if misused."

Reduced sleep was actually possible? It wasn't just another dream? He could get the paperwork out of the way at night and actually have time for a life during the day?

Hazō eagerly opened his mouth—

"What kind of side effects?" Noburi asked.

"Various disruptions to the mind, notably influencing cognitive and emotional function, vulnerability to disease spirits of various breeds, and impaired reflexes and coordination, among others," Orochimaru listed. "Naturally, these do not occur if the seal is used correctly."
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Noumero said:
You're suggesting that we make the rift theft look like a sealing failure, because you're assuming that Sasori regularly does infusions at the rift site, which means it's plausible that he causes a sealing failure and destroys the rift. If Sasori is truly doing infusions at the rift site, then he is truly constantly risking causing a rift-destroying onsite sealing failure! If the scenario you want to deceive them into believing is something that might actually happen, then it is something that might actually happen, which means the Akatsuki would need to be morons who are constantly risking destroying the afterlife rift.
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It needn't be likely - merely less unlikely (from their perspective) than the truth.

Research sealmasters getting their whole clan killed - an outcome that they probably try about as hard to avoid as Sasori is trying to avoid dying and destroying the rift - seems to be something that happens 2+ times a century across the whole world, a very low rate but not truly unprecedented.

Superweapons capable of a kilometers-wide radius of destruction have come into existence, what, three times ever? EM, maybe the creation of the tailed beasts, maybe rinnegan techniques. One of these they don't know about, the other two are powers out of legend, not the sort of thing that a sealmaster can invent.
 
If more or less sleep leaves base rate unchanged, could try to get benefits from sleeping more.
Rune of Extra Restful Nap. Sleep fours hours in the middle of the day near the rune, refresh chakra and SC hours.
 
OrthernLight said:
Superweapons capable of a kilometers-wide radius of destruction have come into existence, what, three times ever? EM, maybe the creation of the tailed beasts, maybe rinnegan techniques. One of these they don't know about, the other two are powers out of legend, not the sort of thing that a sealmaster can invent.
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The Gouketsu's reputation for powerful explosions is well-established and Itachi had previously shown he thinks of Hazou as "this guy who keeps inventing things that kill Akatsuki members". They know Hazou knows about the rift, and it should be obvious that we went missing in order to do something about it.

There is no way they will not connect the dots; that they'd instead assume that Sasori was incompetent in a way that ought to be highly out-of-character for him.

And that's assuming Sasori is even at the rift site. Which, again, he probably isn't. He's far away, tinkering with some rift in some random patch of nowhere: his equivalent of our bladehorrors rift, something he'd accidentally opened once and can now re-use for this project, whose location is known to no-one else.
 
I think I'd rather have something that zaps you to fully refreshed while you're taking an hour nap or something similar.

Or just like, a pile of magical cocaine. Can we do that with runes? Metric ton of magic cocaine? Would certainly buff the base XP rate...
 
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