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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Left-Hand Mutant said:
OK, seriously, we need to make a plan. Does anyone have a better idea than the above?
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Yes. I feel like you're focusing on the "Oro backstabs us after the assault" case to the point where it unacceptably impairs our actual odds of success. Plus, even just considering not dying to Oro, if Oro was planning to kill us and we then show up with little to contribute he might just kill us right then.

I think we should be honest. Orochimaru might backstab us after the assault, and that is something we should consider; but he also might genuinely intend full cooperation in the face of an existential threat. In particular, if we link up with Leaf's S-rankers, Oro will probably not be physically able to backstab us after the assault; your original idea of leaning hard on linking up with Leaf appealed to me for that reason.

RER 2.0s, possibly supplemented by standard RERs if substrate proves limiting, provide at the very least a devastating alpha strike that will wipe the board of any prepared defences, kill anyone less than S-rank in the immediate blast zone, and might kill some S-rankers too if we get lucky. In combination with a max-range Air Leadener activated after the initial barrage, they might let us pick off S-rankers even when they're prepared, all with approximately no risk to us assuming we can set them up without being spotted. Downplaying that to try to get Oro to be more willing to link up with Leaf seems ... foolish, especially since the runes you suggest we focus on instead - defensive runes - do not effectively defend Leaf from attack or siege. (High-level Earth Element users or high-level Physique will bypass Iron Earth under its current mechanics, and we don't know how Force Domes would hold up against Samehada's drain, Amaterasu, or whatever esoteric BS Sasori can bring to bear; not to mention that it doesn't block teleportation.)

To sum up, I think we should present our plan as an RER 2.0 alpha strike followed by Air Leadeners and the subsequent shots of the RER 2.0s to pick off survivors, with Boss/Essie rush as a backup plan for when some of them inevitably aren't killed by that.

Left-Hand Mutant said:
This isn't a big loss, as we really don't have the stealth to hide for Akatsuki senses while setting up, or the chakra to set up, and the setup for RER2 spam isn't very compatible with the better strategies of teaming up with Leaf for Boss/Essie Rush.
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I disagree with this point. I remain of the opinion that Kisame's chakra sensing range probably doesn't extend for kilometres, we can dodge Hidan's blood sense using Oro's biosealing procedure or maybe even just using SCs, and Akatuski's other sensory capabilities are limited (Itachi doesn't have the chakra to keep any decently strong crows out 24/7, for example). I also think that teaming up with Leaf is totally compatible with RER 2.0 setup if it turns out we can carry the blanks in from the Seventh Path; if we can't, there is a problem in that we can't make SCs and refill them to shape the blanks without Noburi onsite but we can't get chakra from Leaf without Noburi in Leaf, but Noburi can carry 2000 CP and Oro can carry at least 2000 more; that's enough for quite a few runes even without access to much in the way of refills. Plus, remember that even if we can't carry RER 2.0s from the Seventh Path, it's much more likely that we'll be able to carry standard REs, and those are nearly as effective for demolishing structures and killing non-S-ranker backup.
 
Kyreneryk said:
Yes. I feel like you're focusing on the "Oro backstabs us after the assault" case to the point where it unacceptably impairs our actual odds of success. Plus, even just considering not dying to Oro, if Oro was planning to kill us and we then show up with little to contribute he might just kill us right then.

I think we should be honest. Orochimaru might backstab us after the assault, and that is something we should consider; but he also might genuinely intend full cooperation in the face of an existential threat. In particular, if we link up with Leaf's S-rankers, Oro will probably not be physically able to backstab us after the assault; your original idea of leaning hard on linking up with Leaf appealed to me for that reason.

RER 2.0s, possibly supplemented by standard RERs if substrate proves limiting, provide at the very least a devastating alpha strike that will wipe the board of any prepared defences, kill anyone less than S-rank in the immediate blast zone, and might kill some S-rankers too if we get lucky. In combination with a max-range Air Leadener activated after the initial barrage, they might let us pick off S-rankers even when they're prepared, all with approximately no risk to us assuming we can set them up without being spotted. Downplaying that to try to get Oro to be more willing to link up with Leaf seems ... foolish, especially since the runes you suggest we focus on instead - defensive runes - do not effectively defend Leaf from attack or siege. (High-level Earth Element users or high-level Physique will bypass Iron Earth under its current mechanics, and we don't know how Force Domes would hold up against Samehada's drain, Amaterasu, or whatever esoteric BS Sasori can bring to bear; not to mention that it doesn't block teleportation.)

To sum up, I think we should present our plan as an RER 2.0 alpha strike followed by Air Leadeners and the subsequent shots of the RER 2.0s to pick off survivors, with Boss/Essie rush as a backup plan for when some of them inevitably aren't killed by that.


I disagree with this point. I remain of the opinion that Kisame's chakra sensing range probably doesn't extend for kilometres, we can dodge Hidan's blood sense using Oro's biosealing procedure or maybe even just using SCs, and Akatuski's other sensory capabilities are limited (Itachi doesn't have the chakra to keep any decently strong crows out 24/7, for example). I also think that teaming up with Leaf is totally compatible with RER 2.0 setup if it turns out we can carry the blanks in from the Seventh Path; if we can't, there is a problem in that we can't make SCs and refill them to shape the blanks without Noburi onsite but we can't get chakra from Leaf without Noburi in Leaf, but Noburi can carry 2000 CP and Oro can carry at least 2000 more; that's enough for quite a few runes even without access to much in the way of refills. Plus, remember that even if we can't carry RER 2.0s from the Seventh Path, it's much more likely that we'll be able to carry standard REs, and those are nearly as effective for demolishing structures and killing non-S-ranker backup.
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I'll put together my protoplan tonight, might not post it until voting closes to avoid confusion. But I tend to agree with this on the whole. We cannot compromise the assualt to try to guide(?) Orochimaru to the conclusion we want him to draw. Cards on the table.

If he betrays us I think we can get away well enough that tracking him down and stealing the Rift from him is possible.
 
Inferno Vulpix said:
I'd like to try and give a clearer outline of where we're coming from about this, since the disparity between what-players-know and what-QMs-know seems very salient to this example. No need to act on or respond to this immediately, I just want to help share context.

We don't know much about sealing arrays. There's been, I think, just the one quote describing them in any detail. Leaf either doesn't have any surviving examples or we never dug deep enough to find them. They were most likely used during the world wars, on missions of critical importance sufficient to justify the greater costs of the sub-discipline. I think the one example we heard of was a large defensive dome?

What this translates to, on our side, is a pretty large swath of unclearness about how strong they are, how difficult they are, how costly they are, etc. The only guiding star for this that we have is the general place of seal arrays in the world: the costs outweigh the benefits most of the time, and only in niche situations (like in world wars) do they find any use. That, to me, sounds like a tricky balance to manage, because it takes quite a lot of inconvenience to outweigh the draw of a more potent effect.

Our obvious point of comparison here is runes. Both runes and seal arrays are known for producing much more potent effects, at the cost of much more preparation ahead of time. A rune takes 12 hours to make, 3 if you're rushing, and can't be moved from its spot. Seal arrays, if they have hundreds of elements and each element takes 5 minutes to craft, would easily take tens of hours to prepare, and while they could be scribed at home the act of putting them all into place cannot be done mid-battle (unless you're Konan). It's not one-to-one, but the disciplines seem to be mirror images of each other in that regard: a comparable increase in cost, for a boost in power.

The concern ultimately stems from the following question: "what if the power boost is also comparable?" This last arc has made it pretty clear that, inconvenience or not, runes are incredibly powerful tools that will definitely see more than niche application. There's thus a concern about consistency: do seal arrays largely go unremarked if they have a similar level of power? We went through a world war of our own without the topic coming up, and it doesn't appear that Jiraiya researched any of his own. There's wiggle room still, but the fact that we haven't seen them by now after all the crazy events of the quest definitely points in the direction of "they really are niche after all". There's also a concern from tonal consistency: it doesn't feel like the power of runes would be quite so hyped if they were only marginally stronger than seal arrays. These are, ultimately, us fretting on your behalf, not actual objections so much as "what would I be worried about in your shoes?" but they are still what's been floating around my mind on the topic.

The part of me that thinks of worst-case scenarios imagines the following: seal arrays are nearly as powerful as runes, and as an established part of the setting nearly every major power in the world is well-used to using them. Now that their properties are pinned down properly, we can start to ask the question of when they should be used going forwards. Just like with runes, the answer quickly becomes "they're too useful to be ignored", and suddenly every other major power around starts throwing around rune-tier effects that they definitely always had but never felt the need to talk about until now. And on our end, all our time we spent as a sealmaster before arrays were a thing we could engage with, all the time we spent quietly ruling out that Leaf had any of its own, leaves us holding the bag with no arrays of our own and no way to get any since Leaf doesn't have any either. This is, of course, pretty unrealistic, since it runs contrary to both how niche arrays have been described as and how unprecedented runes have been depicted as, but it's still a frightening image: as if the rest of the world powerscaled up to match our runic effects.

While it is always within human nature to worry about such things even if they're unrealistic, I don't think we'd be this worried under ordinary circumstances. After all, there's no way seal arrays will actually turn out to be that powerful, right? What tipped this over into more active worry was the recent ruling (now redacted) that Hazou believes the nature chakra ward could have been accomplished with a sealing array. If so, that would anchor the power of arrays pretty high. Really high, high enough that it'd be hard to argue they aren't as powerful as runes. There are, of course, other ways to look at it, like if it was the power of a hundred arrays all active at once, but it fed a trickle of doubt nonetheless, one that we're anxious to banish.

At the end of the day it's hard to say that we're not also motivated by simple concerns like "we want runecrafting to remain special" or "we don't want this tool that our enemies have but we don't to be strong". I do admit that I like runes wielding the most raw power in the setting by a mile, and that the idea of our foes being stronger only makes me worry more. I also do think that this will in the end shake out into something reasonable and simulationist, once enough time and energy has been directed to it to raise all the questions and iron out all the wrinkles. But it might be a rocky path to get there, and I hope that by sharing our perspective now we can make it smoother.
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Thanks for this, it's really helpful. PONWOG I wouldn't worry too much. We do try to respect existing worldbuilding--that's why we had the whole BotG boss issue in the first place--and if sealing arrays are of comparable power to runes, there must be big enough disadvantages to explain why the world doesn't look like every village has a Hazō or two (in other words, a smoking crater) and why people look at massive chakra effects and go "Yup, the blighter's caused another sealing failure" as opposed to "Huh, must be testing a new sealing array".
 
Velorien said:
Thanks for this, it's really helpful. PONWOG I wouldn't worry too much. We do try to respect existing worldbuilding--that's why we had the whole BotG boss issue in the first place--and if sealing arrays are of comparable power to runes, there must be big enough disadvantages to explain why the world doesn't look like every village has a Hazō or two (in other words, a smoking crater) and why people look at massive chakra effects and go "Yup, the blighter's caused another sealing failure" as opposed to "Huh, must be testing a new sealing array".
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I can come up with a reason why sealing arrays aren't used all the damn time

Sealing arrays required seal Masters of similar skill levels (they also scale like this) and you need a good number of seal Masters in most cases to do one not only that they're harder to use offensively to a point it's basically useless to use them that way defensively pretty good Exchange they are pretty good at defensive techniques also I'm pretty sure the akosky would be able to cheat at them because they have the printer over there
 
Velorien said:
Depends on what you mean by a relevant timeframe. Hazō's already decided not to try to leave instruction manuals, so how long writing one would take doesn't seem like an urgent concern.
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He decided not to intentionally distribute manuals as a deadman's switch. That's a very different thing than leaving Cannai with a backup of blanks and written guides as an insurance in case he dies. For other Gōketsu, if nothing else.

I mean, either it's different enough from the what was already voted in that it needs to go in another plan or it isn't and the first question I asked is relevant again.
 
Kyreneryk said:
Yes. I feel like you're focusing on the "Oro backstabs us after the assault" case to the point where it unacceptably impairs our actual odds of success. Plus, even just considering not dying to Oro, if Oro was planning to kill us and we then show up with little to contribute he might just kill us right then.

I think we should be honest. Orochimaru might backstab us after the assault, and that is something we should consider; but he also might genuinely intend full cooperation in the face of an existential threat. In particular, if we link up with Leaf's S-rankers, Oro will probably not be physically able to backstab us after the assault; your original idea of leaning hard on linking up with Leaf appealed to me for that reason.

RER 2.0s, possibly supplemented by standard RERs if substrate proves limiting, provide at the very least a devastating alpha strike that will wipe the board of any prepared defences, kill anyone less than S-rank in the immediate blast zone, and might kill some S-rankers too if we get lucky. In combination with a max-range Air Leadener activated after the initial barrage, they might let us pick off S-rankers even when they're prepared, all with approximately no risk to us assuming we can set them up without being spotted. Downplaying that to try to get Oro to be more willing to link up with Leaf seems ... foolish, especially since the runes you suggest we focus on instead - defensive runes - do not effectively defend Leaf from attack or siege. (High-level Earth Element users or high-level Physique will bypass Iron Earth under its current mechanics, and we don't know how Force Domes would hold up against Samehada's drain, Amaterasu, or whatever esoteric BS Sasori can bring to bear; not to mention that it doesn't block teleportation.)

To sum up, I think we should present our plan as an RER 2.0 alpha strike followed by Air Leadeners and the subsequent shots of the RER 2.0s to pick off survivors, with Boss/Essie rush as a backup plan for when some of them inevitably aren't killed by that.


I disagree with this point. I remain of the opinion that Kisame's chakra sensing range probably doesn't extend for kilometres, we can dodge Hidan's blood sense using Oro's biosealing procedure or maybe even just using SCs, and Akatuski's other sensory capabilities are limited (Itachi doesn't have the chakra to keep any decently strong crows out 24/7, for example). I also think that teaming up with Leaf is totally compatible with RER 2.0 setup if it turns out we can carry the blanks in from the Seventh Path; if we can't, there is a problem in that we can't make SCs and refill them to shape the blanks without Noburi onsite but we can't get chakra from Leaf without Noburi in Leaf, but Noburi can carry 2000 CP and Oro can carry at least 2000 more; that's enough for quite a few runes even without access to much in the way of refills. Plus, remember that even if we can't carry RER 2.0s from the Seventh Path, it's much more likely that we'll be able to carry standard REs, and those are nearly as effective for demolishing structures and killing non-S-ranker backup.
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Essieclone rush should be plenty of firepower to take the rift without losses.

Submitting to Oro's biosealing is a dealbreaker, just like it was last time. Plus, Jashin Luck, and Sharingan will just see our firing position, etc.
There are to many risks, and getting spotted early starts the fight instantly. That's really bad, because Essie Rush takes like ten minutes to set up.

No need to add a big risk of failure to make our winning strategy win even harder.

And no point in giving Orochimaru other options that better allow him to betray us.

Instead, let's just keep RER2.0 hidden in our back pocket for the next Essie we want to kill. Once people see what we can do, it'll be way harder to trap them in situations where we can use RER.

Sir Stompy said:
If he betrays us I think we can get away well enough that tracking him down and stealing the Rift from him is possible.
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If Orochimaru betrays us after the rift assault, the first warning will be him one-shotting Hazou.

.....I suppose "die, then awkwardly stand around the Afterlife end of the rift until Oro opens it" is one way to "escape"

OrthernLight said:
With that kind of chakra budget, if blanks can be prepared in advance, I think we might be substrate-constrained again even with Oro to BoC more of it. But if not, (infusion cost 50 CP, 60 minutes to work, 4000 CP available) -> 69 rune infusions
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Send Oro a note via Gamahebigai to start prefabricating and storage sealing tens of thousands of units of substrate while we head to the rendezvous.

....I still think RER isn't the better plan available for this fight, just pointing out that the bottleneck you point to can be worked around.
 
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ProperAttorney said:
RE2.0 blanks can be shaped ahead of time, but we have no way of quickly transporting them right now.
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Last I heard there was some question as to whether Hazō could reverse-summon with them but likely not, and the possibility that we'll come up with something else. I agree that finding a way of quickly transporting them is not likely though. In which case I think we can do about 7 of them with 4000 CP and a few hours work.
 
Left-Hand Mutant said:
If Orochimaru betrays us after the rift assault, the first warning will be him one-shotting Hazou.
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We're a lootbox. We do not present enough of a threat that he would fear our reprisal if he tried and failed to capture us. Killing us would be very easy for him so he might as well try to paralyze us first so he can torture all the knowledge out of our heads before he kills us.

It's not a better outcome - arguably worse! - but it is true.
 
Velorien said:
Thanks for this, it's really helpful. PONWOG I wouldn't worry too much. We do try to respect existing worldbuilding--that's why we had the whole BotG boss issue in the first place--and if sealing arrays are of comparable power to runes, there must be big enough disadvantages to explain why the world doesn't look like every village has a Hazō or two (in other words, a smoking crater) and why people look at massive chakra effects and go "Yup, the blighter's caused another sealing failure" as opposed to "Huh, must be testing a new sealing array".
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My solution:

Sealing Arrays are essentially an extension of 2-D paper sealing into 3-D Paper sealing, with a huge amount of caveats. Enough caveats that it's more accurate to call it 2.5-D Sealing.

Because what you're doing is essentially creating a giant paper seal, you can push the limits of normal paper sealing 'further' than they should. But correspondingly, error become more likely and also more dangerous. If a normal seal is 100 lines of code which could all affect each other, a paper sealing array is an intricately arranged set of 100 unique seals each with 100 unique lines of code all intended interface each other. You have 100x100 = 10,000 times the chances compared to a regular seal to crate a massive and horrifying sealing failure, but only a linear increase in power (10,000 lines of code vs 100 lines of code).

Basically you're seeing quadratic increases in difficulty compared to linear improvements in capability. Plus all the other problems.

A 'Sealing Array' can 'push' the capabilities of normal paper sealing beyond the norm in an intuitive and linear manner, but the difficulty of doing very rapidly outstrips the benefits. Further, in combat, sealing arrays are trivial to destroy compared to normal seals, since you only need to destroy any seal as opposed to all of them. On top of having to research the entirety of the sealing array as a regular seal, with all the corresponding increases in time taken and so forth.. It just doesn't happen outside of rare and very niche scenarios. But it's a logical and intuitive extension of regular sealing, so it still happens.

===

In fact, thinking about it, MARS, Activation Relay Seal as well the Skywalkers (and Air Domes, Light Relays) might well be considered derivatives or otherwise closely related to this concept of Sealing Arrays (using multiple seals to achieve something a normal seal cannot).

Under this definition, a Sealing Array could be considered in a purely technical term to be 'Any paper seal that required 2 or more discrete seals to work as intended', but in-universe is probably considered to be '5+' (or a general range of 'oh my gods if there's a sealing failure everyone is going to die' number of regular paper seals).
 
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    • Scheduled vote count started by eaglejarl on Dec 1, 2024 at 7:34 PM, finished with 171 posts and 22 votes.
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    • Left-Hand Mutant said:
    Essieclone rush should be plenty of firepower to take the rift without losses.
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    I very much doubt this. Remember, Oro said Akatsuki has set up a fortress around the rift; we're not attacking open ground, we're attacking a fortified area that's probably trapped to Naraka and back. Sasori's seals might be limited in supply, but Konan's aren't and she's still jounin-level. On top of that, as we charged the fortress, we'd be subject to Deidara's bombardment, Kisame's high-tier ninjutsu, etc., and we'd also be giving everyone there preparation time to buff up and pick their targets.

    RERs fix this problem by sweeping the board clean of traps, fortifications, and minions. With them, attacking an Akatsuki-occupied fortress is merely dangerous. Without them, it's suicide.

    Left-Hand Mutant said:
    Submitting to Oro's biosealing is a dealbreaker, just like it was last time. Plus, Jashin Luck, and Sharingan will just see our firing position, etc.
    There are to many risks, and getting spotted early starts the fight instantly. That's really bad, because Essie Rush takes like ten minutes to set up.
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    Disagree with both of these. Allowing Oro to bioseal us is a risk, but the blood-changing procedure sounds like it wouldn't involve persistent bioseals, and there's probably a limit to what Oro can do without leaving active bioseals on someone (and we can check for those later). Jashin's luck is not of infinite potency, since Hidan hasn't already found us, and even if he decides to go for a wander and coincidentally runs into us, with multiple Oro clones on site we might well be able to defeat him before he managed to raise an alarm. We have no evidence that the Sharingan's chakra sight stretches for kilometres before being (for example) rendered unclear by ambient chakra, and it seems somewhat unlikely that it does.

    It's true that all of these are risks. But I don't think we have other options, and there are precautions we can take (have a primed Landmine rune on site, for example).

    Left-Hand Mutant said:
    Instead, let's just keep RER2.0 hidden in our back pocket for the next Essie we want to kill. Once people see what we can do, it'll be way harder to trap them in situations where we can use RER.
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    We have exactly one rune capable of killing S-rankers at the moment. However, we have many candidate runes that we just haven't had time to research. When do you expect to need RER2.0 more than right now, when we're attacking a fortified static location filled with S-rankers who have no idea runecrafting exists? It's hard to think of a situation more perfect for RERs than this one.


    Velorien said:
    Thanks for this, it's really helpful. PONWOG I wouldn't worry too much. We do try to respect existing worldbuilding--that's why we had the whole BotG boss issue in the first place--and if sealing arrays are of comparable power to runes, there must be big enough disadvantages to explain why the world doesn't look like every village has a Hazō or two (in other words, a smoking crater) and why people look at massive chakra effects and go "Yup, the blighter's caused another sealing failure" as opposed to "Huh, must be testing a new sealing array".
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    Suggestion: seal arrays can produce large-scale effects, but not much larger than the array itself or much greater than the sum of the individual seals. So if you want, you could make a force dome twenty Zones across using a sealing array, but you'd have to make an array with elements that encircled the entire area (rather than just putting an array in the centre like you could with a rune), you'd maybe also need elements in the area to support the roof of the dome (which would probably be much flatter than a real Force Dome), and optionally you'd have to continually replace the seal elements as they burn out under the strain (which would also make designing the array harder because you'd have to make it able to tolerate element replacement). On top of that, the shield might be weaker than what a rune would produce, because it'd only be as strong as the shields the individual seals could produce, just coordinated to cover the whole area.

    This would make seal arrays best suited for producing transient effects inside or just outside relatively small arrays. To take the summon example, you could make an array that covered a Zone, or several Zones, and blocked Summoning in that area for a few minutes; but you couldn't have a seal array a few Zones across that covered an area kilometres across and lasted for weeks. In warfare, they'd then be suited for traps (against specific S-rankers, say, if you can lure them into the array), bombardment (since you can generate an effect inside the array and then project it outwards, say by generating a projectile) subject to the need to replace seal elements as they burn out, or emergency defence (you can put up a village-covering dome if you want, but you're going to need all your sealmasters on overtime to keep up with the burnout and maybe also sealmasters to ensure that the dome stays coordinated, so it only really works when you have a massive stockpile of seal elements).

    The big question this would leave unresolved is Whirlpool, since they presumably used seal arrays to do whatever it is they did; but honestly, it wouldn't surprise me much if Whirlpool had some major advance on the discipline that we hadn't heard about. (Maybe that carved-seal discipline we heard about is actually secretly perfectly suited to seal arrays because the carvings are way more resilient to the stress of being in a sealing array than paper seals are, for example. Or heck, maybe Whirlpool reinvented runecrafting; it's not that implausible, if they somehow found a different source of knowledge about the discipline.)
     
    Have Mari genjutsu Hazo, implanting false memories of the deadman-switch discussion going almost exactly the way it actually did. Then he can truthfully say to Oro (if and when it seems immediately relevant):
    "Plans for how to discourage you from killing me involved my own memories being altered, after discussing which summon-clan bosses we're currently on good terms with. As such, at the moment I cannot - even if I wanted to - usefully say exactly how many relevant contingencies were emplaced, much less reveal specifics which might be relevant to bypassing them."
    Oro's just recently seen (from the toad messenger) that Team Uplift is willing to significantly inconvenience themselves by leveraging restrictive oaths. He also already knows they've got the Heartbreaker, and a Frozen Skein user. So, in that context, some ridiculous double-blind Rube Goldberg machine could be a credible bluff. Doesn't have to stop him cold, just look like more of a hassle to sort all that out than the probable consequences of letting us live.
     
    strange_person said:
    Doesn't have to stop him cold, just look like more of a hassle to sort all that out than the probable consequences of letting us live.
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    I've been saying something like this from the very start. Not the Mari genjutsu part, but just... have Hazo be ignorant to the full extent of precautions taken. Ask others to set things up to protect Hazo so that Hazo could not defuse the situation alone, and by extension Orochimaru with a captured and compliant Hazo couldn't either.

    It's as simple as "I'm gonna go stand out of earshot while the rest of you discuss the topic. Don't tell me about the results, just assure me when you've got something sufficient in place."
     
    redzonejoe said:
    Not the Mari genjutsu part
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    My logic for including that is Oro might have a way to check for genjutsu. if he does - and, as a pessimal case, is somehow able to examine both the false memories, and the next layer under them - it'll look like confirmation of the story, with a certain paranoid sort of Occam's Razor implying at least one additional degree of mnemonic obfuscation which he wasn't able to find and penetrate.
    After all, Mari really does have a unique memory-meddling jutsu, which was able to beat one of the traps in Oro's basement. Between that, and Hazo's hard-earned reputation as the Mad Clan Lord... well, everyone knows you don't get to live as long as Oro plans to by picking unnecessary fights with sealmasters on their own prepared ground. "Some obscure trick I never heard of before" is a theory of his own defeat which Oro is all too willing to accept, as evidenced by the fact that Kakuzu's death involving mostly-conventional violence came as such a surprise to him.
     
    strange_person said:
    My logic for including that is Oro might have a way to check for genjutsu. if he does - and, as a pessimal case, is somehow able to examine both the false memories, and the next layer under them - it'll look like confirmation of the story, with a certain paranoid sort of Occam's Razor implying at least one additional degree of mnemonic obfuscation which he wasn't able to find and penetrate.
    After all, Mari really does have a unique memory-meddling jutsu, which was able to beat one of the traps in Oro's basement. Between that, and Hazo's hard-earned reputation as the Mad Clan Lord... well, everyone knows you don't get to live as long as Oro plans to by picking unnecessary fights with sealmasters on their own prepared ground. "Some obscure trick I never heard of before" is a theory of his own defeat which Oro is all too willing to accept, as evidenced by the fact that Kakuzu's death involving mostly-conventional violence came as such a surprise to him.
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    This seems like insufficent benefit when the cost of doing it is giving Mari brain damage. (I mean, minor brain damage - but still.)
     
    Kyreneryk said:
    This seems like insufficent benefit when the cost of doing it is giving Mari brain damage. (I mean, minor brain damage - but still.)
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    Click to shrink...
    I don't think he means using the mega genjutsu, just a regular one with the implication being that the mega one may have been used to obfuscate things even further.

    Still seems like unnecessary layers of complication. K.I.S.S.
     
    [X] Protoplan: The Dawn's Demise
    Word Count: ???
    Desired Duration: A few days
    • Ask Mari to quietly set up the EM Nuke dead man's switch
    • Sanity check all with the rest of the team
    • Travel to Orochimaru
      • Set up at the edge of SC range, under cover and concealment, use SCSA/SSSA, Ninja Radar etc. be ready to leave if things don't go well.
    • Meet with Orochimaru
      • Send just Mari and Hazou, both as SCs.
      • Do not look at any potential seal in Orochimaru's lab
      • Be prepared for it to be distasteful.
    • Discuss the Riftwar
      • Keep in mind that Orochimaru does not like people. Be direct and to the point (and polite of course).
      • Inform him what capabilities we bring to the table, Air Leadening, Icarus, Force Dome, Iron Earth, Remote Explosive 1.0/2.0, Ninja Radar
        • If he questions our lack of offense, say that we focused on defending Leaf from Deidara and Konan first and ran out of time working on additional offensive runes.
        • If he questions the total number of runes, say that we explored many potential avenues of research but many did not pan out.
      • Do NOT mention TRs or Rift Runes
      • Hazou and potentially Noburi have obtained permission from their Clan Bosses to Summon them for this fight.
      • Noburi enables refilled SCs of S-Rankers on our side. Like during the Dragonwar.
      • That said, we have multiple unsolved problems
        • Hazou still cannot produce substrate, if runes need to be mass deployed we would need Orochimaru to make more for us
        • Hazou doesn't actually have the reserves to Summon Cannai. Under ordinary circumstances we would never ask for this, but Hazou suspects Orochimaru has a bioseal to improve chakra reserves. Would he be willing, under these circumstances, to apply it to Hazou?
        • Most of our strongest offensive strategies require strategic amounts of chakra, we were not able to solve this problem while missing and had planned to rely on Leaf to provide it.
          • Is there any reason not to involve Leaf? They provide 2 additional S-Rank fighters, several Summoners who can potentially Summon Clan Bosses and enough chakra to make those strategies worthwhile.
          • Be alert for his answer and Mari should keep any eye out for him deceiving us.
        • How much time does Orochimaru think we have left?
        • Does he have any idea which (if any) Akatsuki members are on site? Numbers of other forces?
     
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