Please send Oro a message via Gamahebigai asking him to make and seal 10000+ units of substrate while we travel to the randevous point. It could save a lot of time
I don't think this will significantly speed things up. He's chakra limited here. Noburi can help with this.
No bioseals no bioseals no bioseals.

I like your plan overall, but I can't vote for a plan with this in it, sorry.
Don't let untrustworthy people install unknown systems in your nervous system.

At minimum, please explicitly sanity-check this and don't do it if everyone tells us we're crazy
They absolutely will tell us we're crazy, and we absolutely can totally understand and defeat anything Oro tries to install on us.
What are you planning on telling Oro about this? Because if it is nothing then that defeats the point of the deadman's switch, but the more details we give him the more he can fuck us with ease later
Nothing, unless he acts threatening, then we tell him. I assume the QMs would give us a decision point if Oro turns hostile.
I'm against this. Why are we even bothering with a deadman's switch if we are willing to give him root access to our very being
Because

1) He's limited in what he can reasonably install and bioseals need ongoing maintenance. So his traps won't last.
2) The benefits of cooperation probably still outweigh the risks for him, he got RC out of us already, and we're clearly willing to work with him. I don't think he's soured on us permanently yet.
3) In time, Hazou will be able to disable his biosealing traps.

So is it worth permanently souring relations to install a trap in a chunin he can kill anyway? Maybe, I don't think so.
Couple more thoughts. First, could I get a bit added to the effect of:
  • Suggested default plan: Multi-RE(R) alpha strike, followed by max-range Air Leadener and subsequent shots to pick off slowed essies, followed by Essieclone/Boss Rush if needed
Sure, I'll come out with another draft tonight or tomorrow morning.
 
Ask Mari to quietly set up the EM Nuke dead man's switch
The main problem with that is that this dead man's switch is pathetically weak; if Oro moves against us, he'll almost certainly take out Mari in the same move (plausibly immediately killing her, not even capturing for interrogation as he'd do with Hazou). So unless she sets up some mechanism to go off that doesn't rely on her physically going around telling people, it does nothing.

Well, I guess we don't have anything better.

Edit: Actually, perhaps we should set up an EM Nuke cache with Cannai? And not tell him what's in it. Tell him to mail that to Grandmaster F and, say, Neji, if we die.
 
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The main problem with that is that this dead man's switch is pathetically weak; if Oro moves against us, he'll almost certainly take out Mari in the same move (plausibly immediately killing her, not even capturing for interrogation as he'd do with Hazou). So unless she sets up some mechanism to go off that doesn't rely on her physically going around telling people, it does nothing.

Well, I guess we don't have anything better.

Edit: Actually, perhaps we should set up an EM Nuke cache with Cannai? And not tell him what's in it. Tell him to mail that to Grandmaster F and, say, Neji, if we die.
I was assuming it was something that would go off if we don't do any ongoing maintenance. Ie a DEAD man's (woman's in this case) switch.

But I'll reread and specify that's what we're doing.
 
I was assuming it was something that would go off if we don't do any ongoing maintenance. Ie a DEAD man's (woman's in this case) switch.

But I'll reread and specify that's what we're doing.
The exact wording is "if you die, she is willing to spread the knowledge about Elemental Mastery nukes". This sounds like if Hazou is a dead man, then the alive Mari is willing manually go around telling people.

Anyway, I think the Cannai thing works better. If we set up some letters with civilians to go out, Oro can just torture that knowledge out of us/Mari and go kill the civilians. Can't disable a Cannai-based deadman's switch the same way.
 
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2) The benefits of cooperation probably still outweigh the risks for him, he got RC out of us already, and we're clearly willing to work with him. I don't think he's soured on us permanently yet.
Something I'd like to emphasize here is that by now we have a reliable pattern of coming to Orochimaru with shinies in hand and saying "would you like to cooperate?" Dragon parts, runecrafting, even Force Dome we just up and gifted him recently.

Now, these are all considered decisions on our part, and we're well aware that Orochimaru being stronger is an intrinsically negative thing for our goals (just often instrumentally positive), and we may stop this train at any point. And we're certainly not sharing our best stuff with him, like Time Runes. But still, the pattern we've clearly established by now is that we keep giving him shinies every now and then whenever we're working towards broadly the same goals.

If you're Orochimaru, you'd wait to see how long the free loot train keeps up, I'd bet. We're still predictably concerned with other threats like the Great Seal, we're still in that same situation that seems to automatically pump value out of us for the sake of expediency. We wouldn't backstab him unless we made enough progress on the Great Seal that we knew we didn't need him anymore. Even if he doesn't trust us, we've made a compelling case that we're a fundamentally predictable individual who's quite profitable to stay on good terms with.
Hahaha wut?

Hazo knows ~nothing about biosealing, can you explain why you are so confident that we can easily undo anything the best biosealer in the setting can do?
The angle I'm coming at this from, aside from "bioseals need maintenance so we should be able to just let it run out", is that bioseals don't sound very subtle. Like, tattooed on your skin, carved on your bone, even just perturbations of our internal chakra flow detectable with stuff like MS8, I think there's a good chance it's just outright impossible to make Hazou unaware that there's a bioseal on him. This means that we can verify our wincon (being bioseal-free) and figure out how far away we are from it (locate all bioseals in our body). The question, then, becomes "how creative do we have to be about getting them out of us?", and I think our toolkit for that is actually pretty decent. Like, I bet in a more extreme case Noburi could simply rip a patch of our skin off and graft on a replacement. Put him in a controled environment, give him time to research the problem, I wouldn't be surprised if that does the trick. And that's before we even touch biosealing ourselves.

As Naruto once said, it's folly to assume S-Rankers are omnipotent in their field of specialty. Can Orochimaru install a killswitch in us? Certainly. Can he install a kill-switch in us that doesn't require maintenance, cannot be detected even by unprecedented medical seals he knows nothing of, and can't be removed even with the dedicated effort of a talented biosealer and a talented mednin fully focused on it? Personally, I doubt it.
 
Please send Oro a message via Gamahebigai asking him to make and seal 10000+ units of substrate while we travel to the randevous point. It could save a lot of time.
Hazo will not be willing to tattoo, brand, or scarify a message into a living being in order to send a message to Oro. (Although, if I'm honest the idea of an extended correspondence via tortured Toad-People does have a certain black humor to it…)
 
Hazo will not be willing to tattoo, brand, or scarify a message into a living being in order to send a message to Oro. (Although, if I'm honest the idea of an extended correspondence via tortured Toad-People does have a certain black humor to it…)
Gamahebigai can just tell Orochimaru verbally like a normal person.
We sent him to snake in the first place to tell Orochimaru a message normally.

It's just messages back to us that he's sworn not to spread.
 
The angle I'm coming at this from, aside from "bioseals need maintenance so we should be able to just let it run out", is that bioseals don't sound very subtle. Like, tattooed on your skin, carved on your bone, even just perturbations of our internal chakra flow detectable with stuff like MS8, I think there's a good chance it's just outright impossible to make Hazou unaware that there's a bioseal on him. This means that we can verify our wincon (being bioseal-free) and figure out how far away we are from it (locate all bioseals in our body). The question, then, becomes "how creative do we have to be about getting them out of us?", and I think our toolkit for that is actually pretty decent. Like, I bet in a more extreme case Noburi could simply rip a patch of our skin off and graft on a replacement. Put him in a controled environment, give him time to research the problem, I wouldn't be surprised if that does the trick. And that's before we even touch biosealing ourselves.

As Naruto once said, it's folly to assume S-Rankers are omnipotent in their field of specialty. Can Orochimaru install a killswitch in us? Certainly. Can he install a kill-switch in us that doesn't require maintenance, cannot be detected even by unprecedented medical seals he knows nothing of, and can't be removed even with the dedicated effort of a talented biosealer and a talented mednin fully focused on it? Personally, I doubt it.
Even if all your assumptions are correct, I expect we could be on for a lot of trouble in the time it takes us to get it out. Spending the next few months with a switch that drops us into a hypersugestable state or whatever is also bad.

The maintenance this works against us. Oro just says "BTW, you need maintenance every 2 months or you get permanent brain damage as it unravels. Each Maintenance session will cost you a major shiny.

And from what we saw of Arikaida, it seems like bobby-traps against removal are very feasible.

And all this for going from 4 boss summons present to 5? Not worth the risk. If Oro has a good reason to exclude Leaf, *then* we can put this option on the table.
 
I say we take the chakra reserves bioseal if he's got some. Put it in a leg though, those are strictly optional from a mad ninja science perspective.

We're closing in to the end of this Akatsuki business. It's time to ride the lightning. Not much room for waffling about stuff.
 
note how Naruto Pepperoni disobeyed a direct order from Prime, as if that part of the jutsu had been disrupted somehow
He did?


Point of order - it's not root access. If Oro could arbitrarily edit people however he liked just by doing surgery on them, he'd already rule the world. Heck, if he could apply any kind of significant mind control that way he'd probably already rule the world.
Don't forget that Kagome has already told you this is a doable thing in the setting. (Although in fairness he was referencing the Sage.) Specifically, he told you that the Sage has been wearing the bodies of various Kage, including Hiruzen, and that he is able to do rapid brain surgery on people to render them loyal. Mari felt that he (the Sage) probably didn't do the brain surgery thing often, but she had no trouble accepting that it happens.
 
Don't forget that Kagome has already told you this is a doable thing in the setting. (Although in fairness he was referencing the Sage.) Specifically, he told you that the Sage has been wearing the bodies of various Kage, including Hiruzen, and that he is able to do rapid brain surgery on people to render them loyal. Mari felt that he (the Sage) probably didn't do the brain surgery thing often, but she had no trouble accepting that it happens.
Also, Noburi, our medical specialist, thinks this is a real threat.

And like, a bunch of other characters have expressed the same worry, but I'm not going qoute-hunting right now.
 
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Don't forget that Kagome has already told you this is a doable thing in the setting. (Although in fairness he was referencing the Sage.) Specifically, he told you that the Sage has been wearing the bodies of various Kage, including Hiruzen, and that he is able to do rapid brain surgery on people to render them loyal. Mari felt that he (the Sage) probably didn't do the brain surgery thing often, but she had no trouble accepting that it happens.
Of Course. Mari is the only other character in the setting that we have seen do any kind of brain surgery. Mari has been within arms reach of every dead Kage that Hazo knows about (including Yagura!). There is only one reasonable conclusion. Mari is the Sage in disguise.

This actually explains why she keeps telling Hazo to build up his physical stats. When she takes over his brain and puppets his body to lead the EN from the shadows for another generation, a big Sealing score will be useless. Only physical stats like Ath actually serve to improve her next meatsuit.

[x] confront Mari about how she is obviously the Sage
 
Yeah but what I'm saying is that you can skip the genjutsu step and just not have those memories in the first place. You don't need to have false memories implanted or memories deleted, you can just... not be included in the planning. That's much simpler and still passes the sniff test. No fancy magic needed.

"Some very smart people figured out some contingencies that would bite you in the butt if you try anything against me." Is every bit as effective as 'I figured out some contingencies and then had my memories of those contingencies erased so you couldn't get them from me' without the weird magic step in the middle.
That doesn't provide the same up-front-provable level of interrogation resistance, though. If Oro's willing to kill Hazo, he can T&I out the "who, exactly, made those plans?" list with his usual 'surgically remove your will to resist' trick, then grab those people, etc. Talk is cheap, and plenty of people like to think they've got some clever plan.
If Hazo doesn't even know who was or wasn't involved in the planmaking - because he clearly remembers his own memories being deliberately compromised, and all the expected traces of genjutsu are present, thus even the best interrogation would only reveal garbage data serving as bait for the first level of traps, some of which probably lead to picking fights with Summon Clan bosses - that looks like a much less favorable scenario if Oro picks 'defect.'
 
Don't forget that Kagome has already told you this is a doable thing in the setting. (Although in fairness he was referencing the Sage.) Specifically, he told you that the Sage has been wearing the bodies of various Kage, including Hiruzen, and that he is able to do rapid brain surgery on people to render them loyal. Mari felt that he (the Sage) probably didn't do the brain surgery thing often, but she had no trouble accepting that it happens.
I … can't tell if you're seriously trying to tell me that this is possible because Kagome (in his earliest, most paranoid stage) said it and Mari humoured him, or if this is a subtle joke.
Mari-sensei shook her head. "Don't grant too much. If they catch him in the middle of a mind-control resurrection ritual they aren't going to immediately jump to 'Sage of Six Paths', they're going to go with 'spy' or at least 'traitor'. Maybe he can talk them down, maybe he can't. He can't do it every time, though. Sooner or later the word would get out that something weird was happening. All the villages spy on each other, and I cannot believe that something like this could be happening frequently over the course of generations without a whiff of it getting out to the Mist intelligence circles. It makes much more sense if it's something that he does only very occasionally." The look she shot Hazō said without words, Or doesn't do at all because it's not real and Kagome is deluded.
 
"Hey Boss," Naruto Pepperoni said slowly. "You said that I should be bothered about the idea of eating people, right?"

Naruto Prime sighed. "Do it," he said, locking his eyes on Mari's.

"Hey now," Naruto Pepperoni said, raising his hands in objection. "Don't I get a say in this?!"

"No. Mari, do it now."

Naruto Pepperoni desperately put his fingers in the shape of a cross and cried out "Multiple Shadow Clone Tech—" but was cut off by four other clones leaping on him Rasengan-first.
Maybe not a direct order, but he was certainly not doing what Prime wanted him to do.
 
It seems like a lot of the crux around whether this is merely bold and unorthodox vs a crazy risk comes down to what we can reasonably expect Oro to be capable of with unfettered bioseal access to our body which is something we don't have the right intuitions for from this side of the 4th wall. But this has come up before, and each time our entire team has been unanimous that they thought it would be insane; I doubt Kagome would trust us again, for one, but I think Noburi has been pretty unwavering as well in saying that it makes no sense and he's the closest to an expert we have?

Even aside from esoteric mind-altering bioseals, he can simply install a seal that expands our chakra capacity in the short term but erodes our long term ability to mold chakra. I expect he could even truthfully tell us that there's always a risk of that outcome with these kind of procedures. Turning is into a civilian neatly removes us as a threat without triggering any of our deadman switches. Or a seal that kills us in 2 months (I'm assuming we won't keep our mutually assured destruction deadman up any longer than necessary, otherwise if rush our choking on a bean at dinner condemning the world).
 
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Would think of accepting a bioseal as risking an instant and ongoing corrupting effect or something that forces us to come back to Orochimaru for treatment. No reason to think a serious attempt to take us down stays dormant after the rift fight. Friendly booby trapped bioseal between peers is a different story.
 
I … can't tell if you're seriously trying to tell me that this is possible because Kagome (in his earliest, most paranoid stage) said it and Mari humoured him, or if this is a subtle joke.
One of Pain's bodies has the power to pull out souls and read memories.
Orochimaru knew he could make mistakes, but he did not think he could intentionally prepare a half-dozen measures meant to foil potentially-hostile S-rankers and have every single one of them fail in their time of need, without a single indication that they would not have worked prior.

Akatsuki knew he was preparing contingencies against them. No doubt Sasori or Konan or Itachi would have made their own preparations against him, when he joined. Yet, how could they have known exactly what his contingencies would be, to prepare counters to every single one of his prepared methods?

Of course! Sasori had claimed that one of Orochimaru's shadow clones had gotten caught in the chakra-nullifying field, destroying its link to its creator. Orochimaru had never received memories from that clone. He'd thought the connection between master and clone had been severed by Sasori's seal. Except… What if that hadn't been why his clone never rejoined his mind? What if instead, Nagato had absorbed his clone's memories, seeing both his true intentions as well as all the steps he'd made in his plan to escape from Akatsuki's grasp?

Though… If the link between himself and his shadow clones wasn't sacred, then could he really rely on the link between summon and summoner?
 
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