- Location
- Yes.
I trust Orochimaru with the specifics, but would argue that "via Seventh Path" should be the default.
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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
- Location
- Texas
- Pronouns
- She/Her
There is literally no point to asking Oro what his plan is regarding the Rift. Supposing he wants to control it personally - then what? We can do nothing about that. It seems fairly obvious that self motivated Orochimaru perceives of the Rift as both an existential threat to himself (because of Pain) and also an endless source of shinies and meaningful research. Asking him what he intends to do at the present moment realistically can only drive a wedge between us. We're literally just asking if he intends to betray us; it's an incredibly foolish question for a number of reasons.
We should also make an effort to have Naruto at the battle to serve as further disincentive for Orochimaru to betray us. The higher a proportion of our relative combat prowess that he is, the more easily he will be able to immediately take action to secure complete personal control of the Rift site.
We should also make an effort to have Naruto at the battle to serve as further disincentive for Orochimaru to betray us. The higher a proportion of our relative combat prowess that he is, the more easily he will be able to immediately take action to secure complete personal control of the Rift site.
Sounds like Hazō's been hanging out with Rock Lee or something.
Come to think of it, as missing-nin standing in opposition to the group who enforce international agreements, we no longer have any reason not to violate the Rock Lee Non-Proliferation treaty...
[Χ] Buy a You-
- wait, no, we'd have to level taijutsu, never mind.
Ah, he does have minions! Or at least one minion. I was kind of expecting the Sound Four, or whatever they'd be called.
Also happens to Kei. And Orochimaru, though he at least has the excuse of having probably the highest social skill in the setting*, even if it's Intimidation. Hazō hasn't had one yet though.
* I figure up at the top there's Pain's presence (but he's dead), Oro's intimidate, Ami's presence, Kabuto's rapport. Maybe there's a deceit-spec up in the top ranks, it's not like we'd know.
Yup - random Orochimaru fangirl.
Like I said.
Wait, is that a thing he can do?
Possible reading comprehension failure, but I don't recall any previous mention of a dome existing
Ah, and that's why Oro doesn't have his own Wakahisa. They might need someone in Mist enforcing this, which is good because if so it limits the amount of manpower at the rift.
Okay, this actually makes sense. I'm now much less worried about his motives.
This kind of thing is why I occasionally gripe about us being bad at running a research program.
Anyone remember if we ever difficulty-checked it?
So I think he's hiding something significant, but it's not combat-relevant against the rift site.
Fortunately, we're also hiding something significant that's not combat-relevant against the rift site.
Flagging this as interesting phrasing, not the more normal "I plan to spend several hours brainstorming and reflecting". Not sure what to read into it. Playing with intentional shadow clone divergence for alternate points of view, maybe? Cognitive bioseals? Or maybe he just has a brainstorming procedure and there's nothing weird to it.
I favor just not using it, except perhaps briefly at opportune moments such as during the initial bombardment (assuming it can be turned off). It hinders our side much more than theirs.
I basically trust his judgement on this, considering that he's worked with them in the past.
As I thought, they'll keep the summoners on different teams when possible, but it appears I'd overestimated Konan's tendency to stay in Rain.
I predicted Kisame at the rift site because Kagome's approach to rift opening with graphoseals requires huge amounts of chakra. Does Oro not buy this, or has he not thought of it? I lean towards the latter, AFAIK he never familiarized himself with our pre-Runecrafting dimensionalism work that they stole, so there's no reason he should know this about it. If so, worth mentioning it to him.
But aside from all that, if he thinks that 4+ of them including Itachi are guarding the rift, why was he willing to attack it without us? I just don't believe that Oro + Leaf would have much chance of winning that without clone/boss rush or relevent runes which he claims not to have.
Orochimaru lived in Leaf with Naruto as Kage longer than we did, you'd think he'd know this, even if he is pretty reclusive.
So how long will the surgeries + recovery take, assuming we do agree to them?
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[X] Action Plan: Under the Knife
Word Count: 397
Intended Duration: Up to the surgery
Word Count: 397
Intended Duration: Up to the surgery
- Orochimaru
- Hazou thinks we should involve Leaf. We stand better odds against all of Akatsuki, fully prepared, than most of Akatsuki, with less preparation.
- Is Naruto's contribution that useful? He's vulnerable to Itachi, and there'll be many clones present. It may make sense to leave him behind to throe off Akatsuki.
- What's the recovery time of the biosealing surgery?
- Will Hazou's damaged coils (Moderate Consequence) present a complication?
- Ideally, we could use a few days to preshape runic blanks and grind veterancy. This could coincide with recovery from surgery, if it's not too invasive.
- We'd ideally use 25+ metric tons of substrate, can you make that much with the available chakra? Noburi is available for chakra redistribution.
- If the bioseal is applied to Hazou would Hazou's SCs have Hazou's new blood?
- If that's not the case, we could potentially skip that bioseal -- all our plans rely on Hazou SCs.
- Debrief Orochimaru on the nature of the Great Seal's degradation, just in case.
- What does Orochimaru think of our odds, overall?
- Team Uplift
- Summarize the meeting.
- Orochimaru doesn't know that you're aware of runecrafting. He must not infer this. Behave as such.
- Mari, thoughts on Endou's viability as a contact? She might be sympathetic, although it could have been a act.
- Sanity-check the rest of the plan with the team
- Noburi, after hearing the description of the bioseal, do you think it will negatively interact with overcharge? Are you willing to disclose overcharge to Orochimaru for his medical opinion?
- Hazou is asking only because it's a relatively niche application of the VD, if Noburi says that he's confident in his answer or that he doesn't want Orochimaru to know, Hazou understands
- Cannai
- Go to the Seventh Path, tell Cannai the proposed timeline for the Riftwar.
- We can stop sequestering Dogs who have contact with Hazou, and soon end the oaths regarding refusing to pass information to Hazou.
- Ask if he knows of other powerful Dogs that might agree to fight in the Riftwar. Some of Kakashi's Summon perhaps? One fought against the Dragons.
- Is Cannai willing to approach them on our behalf, or take us to meet them?
- If he is, take him up on it, try to make a good impression, be frank about the risks (Itachi's soul-stealing sword etc.).
- After the Moderate clears, and only if it's not a substantial biosealing complication, attempt to Summon Cannai.
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Seems like a good plan to me. Tsunade + chakra donors are much bigger combat assets than Naruto under the circumstances.
My leading hypothesis is that since he wants us to not know he has a Kurosawa sample, he needs to act to us as if he doesn't have a Kurosawa sample.
Though he could also derive some value from cross-comparison, or run destrictive tests on Ren knowing that he'd still be able to look at Hazō's intact nervous system afterwards.
But also, it gives Hazō an ongoing incentive to remain on good terms with him and check in regularly; he might want that.
I'm confident that if it there's a need for it we can cause a dire international incident without EM. We're pretty good at international incidents I think.
I'll attempt to look over the action plans later today.
Gratifying to see Hazō carry over lessons on stroking Orochimaru's ego from past bargains.
RPG mechanics for the win.
What did he do this time? /j
This is great. Tsunade might be elsewhere in Fire but good chance she can get moving and tell us which Akatsuki members are watching Leaf.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Thinking about the nitty gritty of rune production and distribution.
On the day of, if we have Leaf chakra at our disposal, our Resolve limits us to producing an extra 6 runes through SC. If Prime is also making one at the same time then we can field a minimum of 7 RER 2.0s through Orochimaru's "craft them 5 miles away, then have Tsunade carry them" strategy. Put a pin in that and come back to it later.
We also need a variety of other runes. On the order of half a dozen? These smaller runes we can move around more conveniently (IIRC), but we still need to find time to create them. Orochimaru's ideal plan of attacking in 4 days doesn't leave us much time to do that. We'll probably need to delay a day or two more to get all that squared away.
Our peak output for a given day is probably 6 rune-clones and Hazou producing an extra 4 on his own (arguably he could work for 15 hours that day instead of 12, but precedent suggests 12 hours will be rated as his maximum for an "all-day commitment") for a total of 10 runes/day. This means that if we have sufficient chakra we probably don't need to delay more than one day for the misc. runes.
Do we have enough chakra for that? Each rune takes something like 300 chakra, and the SC cost can probably be ballparked at 300, so we're talking no more than 3300 total chakra needed. If we outright commandeer all the chakra Team Uplift has, would that be enough? Gut feeling says probably, and if not we can borrow from Orochimaru's minions.
So here's scenario 1: we hash out what runes we need, and get started on crafting everything other than the RER 2.0s, with an eye on finishing everything in one day. We should have the chakra and the clone-hours needed to pull it off. Once we have that sorted we head directly to Leaf, grab Tsunade et al., and set up shop 5 miles away from the rift site. We produce 7 RER 2.0s and have Tsunade move them into position. We're ready to go at the 5 day mark with 7 RER 2.0s. Every extra 3 hours we wait thereafter (5 miles away from the rift, mind) adds another RER 2.0 to our forces.
But also consider scenario 2: after producing the misc. runes at Oro's hideout, we split up and head directly to the rendezvous point. With Noburi's boosted travel we get to O'Uzu before the Leaf forces do and have time to start building RER 2.0s. Let's ballpark it at an extra day, which we'll be spending 5 miles away from the rift, producing 10 RER 2.0s. Leaf arrives on day 5 and the runes are already prepared. We're ready to go at the 5 day mark with 10 RER 2.0s, with the potential to to produce another 7 if we wait another 3 hours (on the assumption that we had time to reset our clone shock before Leaf arrives). The downside, of course, being spending a full day near the rift instead of 3 hours, increasing our odds of getting discovered early and taken out of the equation.
Scenario 3, in which we split up and head to O'Uzu before we even do the misc. runes, only bears mentioning out of completion. Orochimaru heads off to Leaf ASAP and Leaf arrives at day 4. We leave ASAP and arrive at (again, ballparked) day 3. We spend a day producing the misc. runes until Leaf arrives, and then we have to produce the RERs still before we're ready to go. This still has us attack on day 5 in the end, except we spend two full days close to the rift and under threat of detection.
I could be forgetting some important gamechanger here, but if not then we have a pretty simple choice: if we head out early, after finishing the regular-sized runes, we can produce more RER 2.0s at the cost of a heightened risk of discovery before the attack. A tradeoff between power and safety, gambling with our odds of making it to the battle at all to hedge against our firepower not being enough. Personally, I think that's a bad gamble. Compared to 7 RER 2.0s, 10 would be nice and 17 would be great, but it wouldn't shift the calculus nearly as much as the risk of losing Hazou entirely.
In summation, if my assumptions are all accurate here, we should spend a day producing our misc. runes here in Rice, then head with Oro to link up with Leaf, then head to the 5-miles-away point and quickly produce 7 RER 2.0s in three hours before setting things into motion.
On the day of, if we have Leaf chakra at our disposal, our Resolve limits us to producing an extra 6 runes through SC. If Prime is also making one at the same time then we can field a minimum of 7 RER 2.0s through Orochimaru's "craft them 5 miles away, then have Tsunade carry them" strategy. Put a pin in that and come back to it later.
We also need a variety of other runes. On the order of half a dozen? These smaller runes we can move around more conveniently (IIRC), but we still need to find time to create them. Orochimaru's ideal plan of attacking in 4 days doesn't leave us much time to do that. We'll probably need to delay a day or two more to get all that squared away.
Our peak output for a given day is probably 6 rune-clones and Hazou producing an extra 4 on his own (arguably he could work for 15 hours that day instead of 12, but precedent suggests 12 hours will be rated as his maximum for an "all-day commitment") for a total of 10 runes/day. This means that if we have sufficient chakra we probably don't need to delay more than one day for the misc. runes.
Do we have enough chakra for that? Each rune takes something like 300 chakra, and the SC cost can probably be ballparked at 300, so we're talking no more than 3300 total chakra needed. If we outright commandeer all the chakra Team Uplift has, would that be enough? Gut feeling says probably, and if not we can borrow from Orochimaru's minions.
So here's scenario 1: we hash out what runes we need, and get started on crafting everything other than the RER 2.0s, with an eye on finishing everything in one day. We should have the chakra and the clone-hours needed to pull it off. Once we have that sorted we head directly to Leaf, grab Tsunade et al., and set up shop 5 miles away from the rift site. We produce 7 RER 2.0s and have Tsunade move them into position. We're ready to go at the 5 day mark with 7 RER 2.0s. Every extra 3 hours we wait thereafter (5 miles away from the rift, mind) adds another RER 2.0 to our forces.
But also consider scenario 2: after producing the misc. runes at Oro's hideout, we split up and head directly to the rendezvous point. With Noburi's boosted travel we get to O'Uzu before the Leaf forces do and have time to start building RER 2.0s. Let's ballpark it at an extra day, which we'll be spending 5 miles away from the rift, producing 10 RER 2.0s. Leaf arrives on day 5 and the runes are already prepared. We're ready to go at the 5 day mark with 10 RER 2.0s, with the potential to to produce another 7 if we wait another 3 hours (on the assumption that we had time to reset our clone shock before Leaf arrives). The downside, of course, being spending a full day near the rift instead of 3 hours, increasing our odds of getting discovered early and taken out of the equation.
Scenario 3, in which we split up and head to O'Uzu before we even do the misc. runes, only bears mentioning out of completion. Orochimaru heads off to Leaf ASAP and Leaf arrives at day 4. We leave ASAP and arrive at (again, ballparked) day 3. We spend a day producing the misc. runes until Leaf arrives, and then we have to produce the RERs still before we're ready to go. This still has us attack on day 5 in the end, except we spend two full days close to the rift and under threat of detection.
I could be forgetting some important gamechanger here, but if not then we have a pretty simple choice: if we head out early, after finishing the regular-sized runes, we can produce more RER 2.0s at the cost of a heightened risk of discovery before the attack. A tradeoff between power and safety, gambling with our odds of making it to the battle at all to hedge against our firepower not being enough. Personally, I think that's a bad gamble. Compared to 7 RER 2.0s, 10 would be nice and 17 would be great, but it wouldn't shift the calculus nearly as much as the risk of losing Hazou entirely.
In summation, if my assumptions are all accurate here, we should spend a day producing our misc. runes here in Rice, then head with Oro to link up with Leaf, then head to the 5-miles-away point and quickly produce 7 RER 2.0s in three hours before setting things into motion.
Hazou has 57 clone hours per day, so he can produce 14 runic blanks via SC and 3 on his own for a total of 17 blanks. He would need 5400 chakra + SC casting costs so like 5.5k chakra to do such.
Thankfully our team produces about 2k and Orochimaru has those test subjects, so we should be fine.
Noumero
Omit Needless Words
Suggestions:
- @Dictator4Hire's idea about causing a big natural disaster that wouldn't look like our doing, in order to bait Konan to Rain, seems good. We can further try to optimize it such that it'd "accidentally" draw AMITY's attention to the rough neighbourhood of the O'Uzu island, so that the Akatsuki are actuallymotivated to go steer the events instead of just letting AMITY fall apart.
- Might also mention the more direct idea of RERing Rain as a distraction, though I don't think it'd work; the Akatsuki will likely interpret it as what it is and not get distracted.
- We should ask about the social dynamics within the Akatsuki and what's driving the individual members/how Pain controlled them. In particular, if our opening salvo kills some of them, such that the survivors are unsure whether they'd prevail in the following fight, how likely are they to be negotiated down? And if some of them aren't at O'Uzu, how likely the remnants are to mindlessly attack us vs. disperse vs. try to negotiate?
- After we've made all of our suggestions, we should get Orochimaru's assessment regarding how high our odds of victory are, and if he remains very pessimistic, mention Superchillers.
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- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Right, ugh, of course I'd forget that the "19 FOOM blocks" thing measured chunks of 3 hours instead of individual hours. But yeah, with the help of Oro and/or Leaf this shouldn't be a problem, and scenario 1 still remains the best option we have.
Aodyssey
The glass will not protecc you
- Location
- Chaldea
Wouldn't it be nice if Mari has suborned Orochimaru here and we can just mind puppet him? She could have him do [Χ] Armageddon Initiative
This excerpt made me think he 'revealed' that he has his own Kurosawa.
The fact that the time ladder step of "a few hours" can be 2-4 hours depending on the activity is perhaps my most hated ruling in this quest.
Um. You want to hit Konan, a distributed chakra entity anchored to a swarm of paper at least 150 metres wide, with RERs, in Leaf? That seems ... unwise.
Boosting this - it seems like a thing that Oro genuinely may not have thought of that's relevant for estimating force distributions. If Kisame is at the rift site, in particular, that means it would probably be Itachi who would have been sent to infiltrate Leaf so as to maintain summon communication, which is very significant.
Assuming Oro is actually correct that an Akatsuki pair is surveiling Leaf - which he may not be - then one of them will be a summoner to maintain communication, and one of them supposedly must be Konan or Itachi so as to have surveillance skills. That means it's one of:
- Konan & Kisame (as Oro thinks).
- Konan & Itachi (possible, but seems somewhat unlikely given that their capabilities overlap a lot).
- Itachi & Deidara (Konan is covered above, Hidan is an idiot and killed Asuma, Sasori is occupied, Kisame defeats the point of having a summoner there).
- I think this is more likely than it first seems - Oro commented that Deidara wouldn't enhance Itachi, presumably because Itachi has crow summons, but Deidara also provides the threat of raining explosives down on Leaf (as does Konan).
Rihaku
The Internet
Is it confirmed that one unit of substrate = 1 kg? I can't find the relevant post among so many threadmarks.
Any reason to prefer setting up 5 miles away over 40 miles away if Tsunade is carrying them? 5 miles feels uncomfortably close to being in Hidan patrol range. Note. Each rune takes nontrivial chakra and an hour to infuse. Or down to 10 minutes for two time ladder penalties.
If you give them an inch, faflec will nuke a mile. Think about it.
- Location
- Yes.
Don't get it. Elaborate, please - how do you intend to destroy enough of Konan's paper to kill her (read: nearly all of it) using RERs, when Konan would be distributed through a good fraction of Leaf and you would be destroying that entire area in so doing, and when it seems unlikely that Ninja-Radar would work properly on her so we wouldn't know where her papers were?
- Location
- Yes.
I think the implication was that I would advocate for setting off an EM Nuke Rune on Leaf.
Hm.
[X] EM Nuke Rune Leaf
We intended to try that when we first came up with Icarus runes. It was a good idea, IMO, but we didn't follow through.
I genuinely think it's not that urgent now that the dragons at it are dead; the dragons came out 1-2 at a time with at least many months between which should be beatable without gathering multiple bosses, and with HOWS slowing the degradation they should be less frequent now.
If we win the rift battle first this becomes less of a problem
Kisame and Konan are the sanest ones around; I think that if presented with evidence that the other four were all killed, they'll recognize that their position is unfavorable and be willing to negotiate to leave peacefully.
(From our perspective, rooting them out of leaf is a problem in part due to the risk of collateral damage. From their perspective, while we risk collateral damage if attacking them it's also true that they're in hostile territory while the others had fortifications built by their top sealmaster)
We were told 'a few miles' which could be longer than RER range and therefore a big problem.
I will once again promote my parameterized calculation of how many RERs we can produce, in spreadsheet form.
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- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Can we wait until this is over? It's low-probability but the Akatsuki being tipped off now would be heartbreaking.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
In short: it's the number Orochimaru quoted at us:
But there's also something to be said about the strain on Tsunade. How fast can she move these runes? How many clones does she need out to carry all of them? Chakra is a non-issue but clone-hours are and if we need Tsunade to have over a dozen clones run for multiple hours we might reach even her limits, diminishing how many SCs she can use during the battle itself. It's definitely possible that Orochimaru's number was still a lowball, but it's probably infeasible to stay at an actually-safe-distance and move the blanks in from there.
Infusion costs, both chakra and time, are easy to manage. Just have Hazou make a SC for each rune, fill 'em all up with chakra, and infuse them simultaneously. The time that takes is unavoidable and can be considered the final expense of time we need before the attack can start.
Thanks for this, as you can see I've already bungled some of the math there so it's good to have this on-hand.
If we can get Leaf ANBU / Jōnin in on this there might well be somebody around with an efficient technique for moving big items around. IIRC the Motoyoshi had a clan technique that they used to move big pieces of rubble during cleanup after the Collapse, albeit that wouldn't have been over long distances.
Oro's dossier give a half-mile as the furthest observed.
I'm really worried about what they will do to try to recapture the rift, but I do agree that they're the two Akatsuki I think are chill.
And as Orthern points out, it's likely actually Itachi+Konan in Leaf, and I think Itachi is likely to get crazy when he loses the chance to resurrect his bae.
Still, you have a good point.
Neat! Then we can just burry a ninja radar and hope for the best.
Someone with SC needs to be setting off those piles of runes, and Oro doesn't want to show runes to anyone else, so Hazou will be firing the RERs.
Can you please add "attempt to summon Cannai". Thanks.
I don't see it in the Akatsuki dossiers; the source I'm going off of is: