You've asserted multiple times that it's too much work, to be worth it, but not actually explained why you think that. It seems like it wouldn't be much more work than a nervous tapping tic, which many people do unconsciously. And, ultimately, it's up to Hazou/the QM's as to if they think the idea is too cumbersome to implement. It barely costs anything for us to bring up the idea, so I'm not sure why you're so against it.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- 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
Sure, Iron Nerve allows for consistent repetition of stored motions. But
- The existing library of motions is not infinite, and motions aren't universally applicable
- It isn't automatic, Hazou has to consciously trigger each repetition
- There's no record keeping
Since we don't have this, we would need to build a library of motions he can use while doing monotonous tasks. Then he has to consciously both keep a running tally and also trigger the actions over and over while running, sitting, eating, drinking, talking, scribing -- whatever.
- Location
- Washington, USA
Your current plan puts literally zero effort into timekeeping or memory-indexing, less than what I'd consider "minimal."
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Out of curiosity, did you invent this idea yourself or did you pull it from the depths of the archive? It was one of the first abuses that ever got suggested for the Iron Nerve. As I recall, the sequence went something like this:
QMs: Now that we're in character creation, you're welcome to buy a minor bloodline. Nothing overwhelming, as someone with an OP bloodline wouldn't have been sent on this mission.
Player, name elided for politeness: How about something that gives a minor bonus to physical skills? The fluff can be that it's a descendant of the Sharingan that is internal instead of external. It lets you store and recall every movement you've ever made, with perfect fidelity.
QMs: Sure, that sounds fine. In fact, it's a little weak. We'll throw in the ability to download seals.
Player: Great! Okay, now that you've approved it -- no backsies, btw! -- we'll also use it to boost socials by repeating facial expressions, and do time tracking, and do multiplication, and...
(I don't recall but presume that the "can very occasionally have Sharingan babies" and "gets one reroll to avoid death" abilities were also part of the original proposal.)
We said no at the time because we didn't think that stuff would work and it was very excessive to what "a minor bloodline that boosts physical skills" was intended to be. Now here we are, right back in the exact same place. "Here, your bloodline is the same but better bonus." "Cool! Now we'll use it for time tracking and..."
We'll discuss it, but ponwog90, the answer is no. I don't believe it's possible to manipulate your toes like that, especially not while wearing closed-toe shoes, or to do evenly-metered actions as a constant background habit, especially not when something is happening that requires intense focus (eg combat). Beyond that, ten fingers and ten toes don't store infinite information for limitless time tracking, you would lose the count whenever you did something that required your digits be differently arranged, losing a memory of past position would render the count inaccurate as you automatically reset, and a bunch of other problems related to exactly how I envision the bloodline working in terms of motion lookup.
Also, be advised that, even if this new SOP goes through, it's going to look weird and off-putting to anyone Hazō is talking to, as he'll be constantly twitching and fiddling.
Yeah, I figure we'll talk to someone in the settlement and start doing whatever they do. But we ain't there yet.
Vote closed
New
This is counting votes by "Task" and is outputting the wrong count.
This should be correct.
- Location
- United States
They were. Here is the original proposal.
Okay but Dangerous is unironically an amazing theme song for the new arc, tho.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
It really is incredible for it though.
Chapter 704: Sharing the Shimmers
New
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The journey down the mountain wasn't as grim as Hazō had expected. Conserving his chakra meant no chakra boost, which meant no enhanced leaps and no more chakra adhesion than absolutely necessary: the chakra costs of wall-walking were trivial to the point where he couldn't even guess what they were relative to, say, a Multiple Earth Wall, but that was for a ninja whose chakra was constantly regenerating. He couldn't afford to be profligate until he knew exactly what his limitations were in this new world.
But as mountains went, this one seemed practically accommodating. Not once had Hazō barely saved himself from a fall to his doom. Not once had he been forced to stop and turn back when a promising-looking path had ended in a gaping ravine as if the earth itself was opening its mouth to swallow him whole. No, there were actual trails, and easy slopes, and gaps that a fit and healthy (if dead) ninja like him could jump without breaking a sweat. Hazō recalled Daiji's speculations about common memory and wondered if this mountain was a memory of some real mountain. Would an easy mountain be remembered more vividly because it would be climbed by more people and more often?
Then again, a deadly mountain might be better remembered because more people would appear at its corresponding location in the afterlife, and they certainly wouldn't forget that experience in a hurry. Hazō didn't lower his guard, even as he delighted in the mysteriously improved mobility that had awakened inside him, turning tricky jumps into acrobatic leaps, awkward stumbling into fancy footwork, and in one case, a nerve-wracking crossing of a paper-thin natural bridge into something very close to a precision dance (at least until Hazō accidentally looked down).
At the base, the rocky hills seemed to morph into dense forest almost seamlessly, as if nature didn't feel like wasting its time on the intermediary stages that a plausible environment demanded. To a missing-nin accustomed to anticipating the threats associated with each type of terrain, it was disorienting, like identifying the trigger for a pitfall trap only to find that there was no floor to begin with.
As for the forest, it was eerily silent. No birdsong. No rustling from the undergrowth. No distant chittering noises. On the Human Path, that would be an indication of an urgent need to be absolutely anywhere else, and in fact, by the time you noticed, it was probably already too late to run. Here, however, Hazō had no way of knowing whether this was a danger sign or perfectly normal behaviour. Maybe animals, having no souls, didn't come to the afterlife at all.
The flora, too, was strange and unfamiliar. None of the plants reached out to trip Hazō as he passed, or extended unexpected tendrils dripping with venom. It was as if the natural environment was both dead and alive at the same time, much like himself. The impression was only confirmed by the dominant type of tree in the area–each was clearly alive, a broad, hornbeam-like shape with long, thin branches, but each branch ended in a cluster of elliptical ghost leaves.
Once, Hazō was forced to double back, and he could swear the leaves he'd brushed past looked different than before. Now, the irregular rib structures almost looked like they spelled out numbers.
He hastened on. He was going to need a lot more chakra in him before he felt up to investigating these mysteries.
It took a while of exploring–there was no way to measure time beneath that eternally grey sky–but Hazō finally found the location of the first shimmer. By his estimation, it was the one closest to the Wilds and furthest away from the settlement. After absorbing it, he was planning to travel in a loop, getting both of the others on the way to his final destination. Navigating an unfamiliar forest with no map or landmarks (other than the mountain itself) was a long and trying experience, even worse than the time Ino dragged him out clothes shopping and wouldn't let him go until he'd reviewed each dress to her satisfaction–but here, he had nothing but time.
Or so he hoped. He had no idea what the flow of time was like relative to the Human Path. What if Mari was planning to reveal Elemental Mastery to the world after all, and he had mere days to find a way back and stop her? He had to remind himself again and again to have faith in her faithlessness. Mari was family. Just as his sister had learned to not believe in the Kei that believed in him, so he could surely trust Mari to betray him now, in his hour of greatest need.
Besides, if she let him down by obeying his orders, he suspected the entire afterlife would know about it very soon.
These and other wandering thoughts (was Jashin still watching over him, or had he forfeited that grace by dying without battle?) lasted until he reached the clearing and they were all replaced with wonder.
Up close, the shimmer didn't manifest as a blue glow. Rather, it manifested in an aliveness that proved beyond doubt that this was a place where vibrant reality leaked into the prison of the dead–and that aliveness manifested as colour.
The soil was no longer a vague brown. It was pale chestnut, its hue varying in patterns he could trace with his eyes. The bushes were not green. They were a verdant emerald, and the red flowers on them were a passionate vermillion that would have Akane beaming in delight before attempting to collect cuttings (while heavily armoured and with Substitution targets ready, because on the Human Path, red meant the plant was so deadly that it didn't mind giving advance warning).
Even Hazō's own skin seemed more vivid, and he spent a few seconds staring in fascination at the cerulean veins clearly visible beneath it.
Then he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
Hazō dropped immediately. The nearest cover was one of the emerald bushes, and he rolled behind it by instinct before he ever consciously recognised the threat.
The creature he saw through the gaps in the bush was something out of nightmares. It was like a skeleton if skeletons were unnaturally tall, with lanky limbs and many-jointed fingers as long as his forearm. If they had narrow vertical heads with backward-curving horns, and no mouths to be seen. If the curves and protrusions of their elongated forms seemed more fit for an artist's mannequin carved by a man dying of fever, both too angular and too twisted for any human anatomy. If their eye sockets were neither filled nor empty, but bearing a liquid darkness that roiled back and forth in an awkward parody of eyes looking around.
And if that was not enough, the creature was in perfect monochrome. It wasn't just black-and-white. No, it wore monochrome like a mantle. Near it, the colours retreated, faded. By the time they got within arm's reach, there was nothing left of them. Hazō could even see a trail where the creature must have passed, a path of darkness and occlusion being only slowly reclaimed at the edges.
The creature stalked forward, every movement smooth and precise, yet jarringly arrhythmic when taken together. It was hunched slightly, as if used to spaces that could not contain its totality, and its head kept turning back and forth as if seeking something. Was it seeking him?
Hazō was still low on chakra. He had no intel on what he was facing, but it certainly didn't give the vibe of an ordinary chakra beast. His intuition spoke of chakra parrots, higher-form quislings, and other creatures with special powers that meant certain death if you didn't know how to counter them. Daizen's experience suggested that you couldn't perma-die in the afterlife, but that didn't rule out other dangers. Nobody who'd trained with Mari could doubt that it was possible to break a man's mind without ever touching his body, and Daiji's words seemed to imply that memories were a particularly fragile substance in the Pure Land.
Hazō couldn't risk this fight. Certainly not in his current state. He held still and hoped the creature's powers didn't include special senses.
Hazō tensed.
Then the creature stopped, right in the middle of the clearing. It leaned back, opening its arms wide as if in a gesture of exaltation.
The darkness in its eye sockets stilled, then began to gently ripple as if disturbed by drops of water falling in one by one.
Shade by shade, the colours in the clearing lost their vibrance.
Shade by shade, the creature's monochrome aura faded into normality.
Endless seconds passed, and nothing happened except the shifts of colour, steadily growing more intense. Hazō kept his eyes locked on the creature, watching it… feed?
Hazō felt a moment of dizziness as some threshold was reached. No, not dizziness. Something stranger.
There was a special moment, when Hazō drew on his Out-granted powers of perception. A gap after his mind forgot how to see things the human way, but before it remembered how to view them through the lens of alien truth. It was the in-between, a state of perception where shapes were not shapes but lines, and lines were not lines but measurements of distance, and distance was a concept beyond his understanding. Colours were not colours but positions on a spectrum, except that the spectrum was an illusion, and position could not be measured. It was cognitive blindness, but also a tiny hint of how the highest gods must see the world, beyond any pattern that constrained the human mind. It was impossible for Hazō to remember what the world looked like during the in-between, because the mind that was capable of seeing it had to cease to exist before the mind capable of thinking about it could come into existence.
Whatever the creature did, the sight of it briefly placed Hazō in the in-between, simultaneously beyond and beneath cognition, and in that moment, the creature stepped forwards.
A thick, fur-lined boot crunched down on the ground.
Hazō was Hazō again, and in front of him stood a stout, sallow-skinned man, his heavy leather jacket trimmed with fine white fur around the collar and wrists, and several strange bottles and vials hanging off hooks on a black belt around his waist.
The man gave a jovial smile and spent a few seconds looking around his feet, before choosing a large fallen branch to serve as a staff. He hefted it and walked away, mercifully away from Hazō, humming a jaunty tune Hazō felt like he ought to recognise.
In his wake, the man(?) left a completely ordinary clearing. No, a slightly muted clearing, its colours just a little bit drab and dreary compared to the living forest around it. Nothing had died, or even sickened, but everything was fractionally less alive. The kind of place where you'd frown in brief, inexplicable discomfort and quickly move on, without ever stopping to wonder.
As birds(?) began to sing strange and discordant songs in distant trees, Hazō realised he couldn't see the veins in his pallid skin at all.
Though Hazō approached the other two shimmers with wariness worthy of a nod from Kagome-sensei (he missed them all so much already), there were no further nightmares waiting for him.
The first was another nexus of colour, but this one resplendent with vegetation, overgrown to the point where Hazō had to resort to kunai-wielding violence to clear himself a space to sit and meditate within the area of effect. He could feel a phantom Akane (though, sadly, not the phantom Akane) reproaching him for unprovoked violence against docile plants. He assured her it was for the greater good. Maybe when he got back to the Human Path, he'd plant a new hedge on the estate to clear his karma.
The second shimmer continued to glow blue even close up. It was a great pool of water, crystal clear and with azure streams of chakra becoming visible, incredibly, where they entered the water, and fading back into invisibility where they left. Hazō found himself entranced, and he didn't know how long he spent just watching the movement of the streams before he came to and remembered to start meditating.
(In passing, there were tracks leading to and from the pool, as of wild animals coming to drink, but they were unrecognisable and in some cases unnaturally geometric.)
It was in a much more cheerful mood that he approached the walls of the settlement, made of a dark brown, almost black wood he recognised from the near edge of the forest. Sturdier than a village palisade but feeble by the standard of fortifications erected with ninja strength, up close he could see that they were decorated–not with any artistic pattern, but with inscriptions carved in a dozen scripts, many unrecognisably archaic.
Some were more modern, or at least more familiar to a sealmaster who'd studied some strange notes in his time.
"Curse the quack who promised me his elixir would be the cure. May he be cast into a chakra wasp nest with his privates slathered in honey."
"A pox on the Senju, who betrayed the treaty and left us to die. May the Hateful Singer tear out their livers and devour them."
"Damn you, traveller who told me there were no shadow wolves in that forest. Rot in the deepest pits of Naraka where liars are torn apart by their own tongues. Also, damn the shadow wolves."
And once, in enormous kanji, "FUCK YAGURA." (Hazō's smile lasted until he saw another line next to it, carved in clumsy kana low to the ground. It read, "He is a bad man and I hope he dies too.")
Hazō was nearly full on chakra, his body was obeying him better than ever before, and he was feeling confident after two successes and one time cheating a fate likely worse than death. It was time. He scanned the open gates for shadows that might indicate a lurking ambush, as was only proper, then took a few steps forward and crossed the threshold.
What do you do?
Voting ends on
But as mountains went, this one seemed practically accommodating. Not once had Hazō barely saved himself from a fall to his doom. Not once had he been forced to stop and turn back when a promising-looking path had ended in a gaping ravine as if the earth itself was opening its mouth to swallow him whole. No, there were actual trails, and easy slopes, and gaps that a fit and healthy (if dead) ninja like him could jump without breaking a sweat. Hazō recalled Daiji's speculations about common memory and wondered if this mountain was a memory of some real mountain. Would an easy mountain be remembered more vividly because it would be climbed by more people and more often?
Then again, a deadly mountain might be better remembered because more people would appear at its corresponding location in the afterlife, and they certainly wouldn't forget that experience in a hurry. Hazō didn't lower his guard, even as he delighted in the mysteriously improved mobility that had awakened inside him, turning tricky jumps into acrobatic leaps, awkward stumbling into fancy footwork, and in one case, a nerve-wracking crossing of a paper-thin natural bridge into something very close to a precision dance (at least until Hazō accidentally looked down).
At the base, the rocky hills seemed to morph into dense forest almost seamlessly, as if nature didn't feel like wasting its time on the intermediary stages that a plausible environment demanded. To a missing-nin accustomed to anticipating the threats associated with each type of terrain, it was disorienting, like identifying the trigger for a pitfall trap only to find that there was no floor to begin with.
As for the forest, it was eerily silent. No birdsong. No rustling from the undergrowth. No distant chittering noises. On the Human Path, that would be an indication of an urgent need to be absolutely anywhere else, and in fact, by the time you noticed, it was probably already too late to run. Here, however, Hazō had no way of knowing whether this was a danger sign or perfectly normal behaviour. Maybe animals, having no souls, didn't come to the afterlife at all.
The flora, too, was strange and unfamiliar. None of the plants reached out to trip Hazō as he passed, or extended unexpected tendrils dripping with venom. It was as if the natural environment was both dead and alive at the same time, much like himself. The impression was only confirmed by the dominant type of tree in the area–each was clearly alive, a broad, hornbeam-like shape with long, thin branches, but each branch ended in a cluster of elliptical ghost leaves.
Once, Hazō was forced to double back, and he could swear the leaves he'd brushed past looked different than before. Now, the irregular rib structures almost looked like they spelled out numbers.
He hastened on. He was going to need a lot more chakra in him before he felt up to investigating these mysteries.
It took a while of exploring–there was no way to measure time beneath that eternally grey sky–but Hazō finally found the location of the first shimmer. By his estimation, it was the one closest to the Wilds and furthest away from the settlement. After absorbing it, he was planning to travel in a loop, getting both of the others on the way to his final destination. Navigating an unfamiliar forest with no map or landmarks (other than the mountain itself) was a long and trying experience, even worse than the time Ino dragged him out clothes shopping and wouldn't let him go until he'd reviewed each dress to her satisfaction–but here, he had nothing but time.
Or so he hoped. He had no idea what the flow of time was like relative to the Human Path. What if Mari was planning to reveal Elemental Mastery to the world after all, and he had mere days to find a way back and stop her? He had to remind himself again and again to have faith in her faithlessness. Mari was family. Just as his sister had learned to not believe in the Kei that believed in him, so he could surely trust Mari to betray him now, in his hour of greatest need.
Besides, if she let him down by obeying his orders, he suspected the entire afterlife would know about it very soon.
These and other wandering thoughts (was Jashin still watching over him, or had he forfeited that grace by dying without battle?) lasted until he reached the clearing and they were all replaced with wonder.
Up close, the shimmer didn't manifest as a blue glow. Rather, it manifested in an aliveness that proved beyond doubt that this was a place where vibrant reality leaked into the prison of the dead–and that aliveness manifested as colour.
The soil was no longer a vague brown. It was pale chestnut, its hue varying in patterns he could trace with his eyes. The bushes were not green. They were a verdant emerald, and the red flowers on them were a passionate vermillion that would have Akane beaming in delight before attempting to collect cuttings (while heavily armoured and with Substitution targets ready, because on the Human Path, red meant the plant was so deadly that it didn't mind giving advance warning).
Even Hazō's own skin seemed more vivid, and he spent a few seconds staring in fascination at the cerulean veins clearly visible beneath it.
Then he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.
Hazō dropped immediately. The nearest cover was one of the emerald bushes, and he rolled behind it by instinct before he ever consciously recognised the threat.
The creature he saw through the gaps in the bush was something out of nightmares. It was like a skeleton if skeletons were unnaturally tall, with lanky limbs and many-jointed fingers as long as his forearm. If they had narrow vertical heads with backward-curving horns, and no mouths to be seen. If the curves and protrusions of their elongated forms seemed more fit for an artist's mannequin carved by a man dying of fever, both too angular and too twisted for any human anatomy. If their eye sockets were neither filled nor empty, but bearing a liquid darkness that roiled back and forth in an awkward parody of eyes looking around.
And if that was not enough, the creature was in perfect monochrome. It wasn't just black-and-white. No, it wore monochrome like a mantle. Near it, the colours retreated, faded. By the time they got within arm's reach, there was nothing left of them. Hazō could even see a trail where the creature must have passed, a path of darkness and occlusion being only slowly reclaimed at the edges.
The creature stalked forward, every movement smooth and precise, yet jarringly arrhythmic when taken together. It was hunched slightly, as if used to spaces that could not contain its totality, and its head kept turning back and forth as if seeking something. Was it seeking him?
Hazō was still low on chakra. He had no intel on what he was facing, but it certainly didn't give the vibe of an ordinary chakra beast. His intuition spoke of chakra parrots, higher-form quislings, and other creatures with special powers that meant certain death if you didn't know how to counter them. Daizen's experience suggested that you couldn't perma-die in the afterlife, but that didn't rule out other dangers. Nobody who'd trained with Mari could doubt that it was possible to break a man's mind without ever touching his body, and Daiji's words seemed to imply that memories were a particularly fragile substance in the Pure Land.
Hazō couldn't risk this fight. Certainly not in his current state. He held still and hoped the creature's powers didn't include special senses.
This is an example of a situation in which horrible things should happen to Hazō because, even with the improved Iron Nerve bonus, he has low-genin Stealth. However, it is his first encounter with an afterlife threat, and narrative intervenes. The aura of the living world suffusing the clearing masks Hazō's own aura, which still has the feel of the living world for now, and the creature does not bother checking with its other senses.
Hazō tensed.
Then the creature stopped, right in the middle of the clearing. It leaned back, opening its arms wide as if in a gesture of exaltation.
The darkness in its eye sockets stilled, then began to gently ripple as if disturbed by drops of water falling in one by one.
Shade by shade, the colours in the clearing lost their vibrance.
Shade by shade, the creature's monochrome aura faded into normality.
Endless seconds passed, and nothing happened except the shifts of colour, steadily growing more intense. Hazō kept his eyes locked on the creature, watching it… feed?
Hazō felt a moment of dizziness as some threshold was reached. No, not dizziness. Something stranger.
There was a special moment, when Hazō drew on his Out-granted powers of perception. A gap after his mind forgot how to see things the human way, but before it remembered how to view them through the lens of alien truth. It was the in-between, a state of perception where shapes were not shapes but lines, and lines were not lines but measurements of distance, and distance was a concept beyond his understanding. Colours were not colours but positions on a spectrum, except that the spectrum was an illusion, and position could not be measured. It was cognitive blindness, but also a tiny hint of how the highest gods must see the world, beyond any pattern that constrained the human mind. It was impossible for Hazō to remember what the world looked like during the in-between, because the mind that was capable of seeing it had to cease to exist before the mind capable of thinking about it could come into existence.
Whatever the creature did, the sight of it briefly placed Hazō in the in-between, simultaneously beyond and beneath cognition, and in that moment, the creature stepped forwards.
A thick, fur-lined boot crunched down on the ground.
Hazō was Hazō again, and in front of him stood a stout, sallow-skinned man, his heavy leather jacket trimmed with fine white fur around the collar and wrists, and several strange bottles and vials hanging off hooks on a black belt around his waist.
The man gave a jovial smile and spent a few seconds looking around his feet, before choosing a large fallen branch to serve as a staff. He hefted it and walked away, mercifully away from Hazō, humming a jaunty tune Hazō felt like he ought to recognise.
In his wake, the man(?) left a completely ordinary clearing. No, a slightly muted clearing, its colours just a little bit drab and dreary compared to the living forest around it. Nothing had died, or even sickened, but everything was fractionally less alive. The kind of place where you'd frown in brief, inexplicable discomfort and quickly move on, without ever stopping to wonder.
As birds(?) began to sing strange and discordant songs in distant trees, Hazō realised he couldn't see the veins in his pallid skin at all.
-o-
Though Hazō approached the other two shimmers with wariness worthy of a nod from Kagome-sensei (he missed them all so much already), there were no further nightmares waiting for him.
The first was another nexus of colour, but this one resplendent with vegetation, overgrown to the point where Hazō had to resort to kunai-wielding violence to clear himself a space to sit and meditate within the area of effect. He could feel a phantom Akane (though, sadly, not the phantom Akane) reproaching him for unprovoked violence against docile plants. He assured her it was for the greater good. Maybe when he got back to the Human Path, he'd plant a new hedge on the estate to clear his karma.
The second shimmer continued to glow blue even close up. It was a great pool of water, crystal clear and with azure streams of chakra becoming visible, incredibly, where they entered the water, and fading back into invisibility where they left. Hazō found himself entranced, and he didn't know how long he spent just watching the movement of the streams before he came to and remembered to start meditating.
(In passing, there were tracks leading to and from the pool, as of wild animals coming to drink, but they were unrecognisable and in some cases unnaturally geometric.)
It was in a much more cheerful mood that he approached the walls of the settlement, made of a dark brown, almost black wood he recognised from the near edge of the forest. Sturdier than a village palisade but feeble by the standard of fortifications erected with ninja strength, up close he could see that they were decorated–not with any artistic pattern, but with inscriptions carved in a dozen scripts, many unrecognisably archaic.
Some were more modern, or at least more familiar to a sealmaster who'd studied some strange notes in his time.
"Curse the quack who promised me his elixir would be the cure. May he be cast into a chakra wasp nest with his privates slathered in honey."
"A pox on the Senju, who betrayed the treaty and left us to die. May the Hateful Singer tear out their livers and devour them."
"Damn you, traveller who told me there were no shadow wolves in that forest. Rot in the deepest pits of Naraka where liars are torn apart by their own tongues. Also, damn the shadow wolves."
And once, in enormous kanji, "FUCK YAGURA." (Hazō's smile lasted until he saw another line next to it, carved in clumsy kana low to the ground. It read, "He is a bad man and I hope he dies too.")
Hazō was nearly full on chakra, his body was obeying him better than ever before, and he was feeling confident after two successes and one time cheating a fate likely worse than death. It was time. He scanned the open gates for shadows that might indicate a lurking ambush, as was only proper, then took a few steps forward and crossed the threshold.
-o-
What do you do?
- Seek information (what do you ask?)
- Seek resources (what, and what are you prepared to barter for them?)
- Offer to help (find ways to win the hearts of the villagers and open up new opportunities, at the cost of time and perhaps risk)
- Write-in
Voting ends on
Last edited:
- Location
- Yes.
[X] Meeting update
[X] Action Plan: The Meetings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Word Count: <<299
Word Count: <<299
- Seek information
- Ask the questions already answered
- How often do travelers come through?
- Ask if they've seen or heard of anyone matching Jiriaya's or Akane's description
- Seek resources
- Sealing materials are of primary importance -- a brush, brass trinket, ink, and paper are top priorities.
- Offer to help -- what are their major problems?
- Hazou was a ninja in life, and he has ninja skills -- offer to use those to help them out in exchange for sealing materials. Or the promise of future materials, if Hazou gets killed again and has to return to his spawn point.
Last edited:
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
So, what do we want from this village?
Intel is the biggest thing, of course, we want to figure out what resources the afterlife has other than chakra, or if they have know where other villages are, or other contextual information that will help us estimate Jiraiya and Akane's situations. But it shouldn't just be intel, that'd be a meeting update.
The other big thing we'd want to look for is sealing-related resources. Do these people have paper? Do they have any brass? I don't imagine we'll immediately find everything we need, but we'd get closer to having some of that capability back.
As a fresh dead, those of the village who are still invested in the land of the living are bound to be interested in what we know. Memories are wonky things here, but we can probably tell people that, say, Yagura died a few years ago without losing anything ourselves.
Honestly, it might be worth tracking down the Mist-nin of the village first. Nobody knows who we are here, we don't have to be "Goketsu Hazou" (if they would even recognize the Goketsu name), and we could wring a more personal discussion out of them than if we just talked to the guy assigned to talking to newbies.
(We should also consider pretending to not be newbies, at least overtly, in case it's both possible and common practice to scam newbies out of some of their memories or something.)
Intel is the biggest thing, of course, we want to figure out what resources the afterlife has other than chakra, or if they have know where other villages are, or other contextual information that will help us estimate Jiraiya and Akane's situations. But it shouldn't just be intel, that'd be a meeting update.
The other big thing we'd want to look for is sealing-related resources. Do these people have paper? Do they have any brass? I don't imagine we'll immediately find everything we need, but we'd get closer to having some of that capability back.
As a fresh dead, those of the village who are still invested in the land of the living are bound to be interested in what we know. Memories are wonky things here, but we can probably tell people that, say, Yagura died a few years ago without losing anything ourselves.
Honestly, it might be worth tracking down the Mist-nin of the village first. Nobody knows who we are here, we don't have to be "Goketsu Hazou" (if they would even recognize the Goketsu name), and we could wring a more personal discussion out of them than if we just talked to the guy assigned to talking to newbies.
(We should also consider pretending to not be newbies, at least overtly, in case it's both possible and common practice to scam newbies out of some of their memories or something.)
[] Teach the villagers about archimedes screws
- Location
- Yes.
[X] Get intel from the villagers and then kill them so they don't leak our location to the
Not if we want Sealing resources
@eaglejarl @Velorien @Paperclipped
In the interest of avoiding a meeting update I'm posting a bunch of OOC questions we have for the village and hopefully we can act on
In the interest of avoiding a meeting update I'm posting a bunch of OOC questions we have for the village and hopefully we can act on
- Is there an orientation they give the new arrivals? What do they think we need to know?
- How large is the village? How many former ninja live here? Which villages are they from?
- What do they know about afterlife geography in general?
- Has anyone ever heard of tooth-shaped mountains?
- Is there a larger town nearby? Is there some sort of government or leader?
- What do they use for money? How do people get it?
- Is there something a new person could do to make themselves useful?
- Do they know anything about how afterlife arrivals are distributed?
- If one wants to find a person or thing, how is that generally accomplished?
- How to they keep track of time with no sun?
- What are the primary dangers in the afterlife besides memory drain
- Relatedly, are there known strategies for resisting the memory drain?
- What happens if Hazou dies again? Will he respawn near where he did the first time?
- Lastly, Hazou had a strange encounter with a skeletal demon(?) who absorbed a shimmer and shapeshifted(?) into a bearded man. Do they know what the fuck is going on with that?
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
(As always, this is coming from all three QMs.)
Let's start by answering the question: we enjoy having Hazō be the Dog Summoner. It's a safe bet that there will be a way for him to get the Scroll back in the future. As to his seals – honestly, at this point we're simply going to say "we'll figure it out later, since it's not going to be relevant until probably 2026." And yes, we're open to discussing things with the players when the time comes.
Now let's talk the other piece:
First, we aren't keen on having words like 'unfair' directed at us, and we're getting a bit frustrated by the current discourse around this whole topic. There seems to have been some confusion – possibly with our writing on the announcements, possibly with the reading of the announcements, but it exists.
Here's the deal: From where we sit, nothing about that chapter was unfair. Let's go through it:
Q: Was this chapter simulationist?
A: We already said it was not. What we intended by that – and, indeed, what we actually said – was essentially "we wrote an exciting chapter that came to the simulationist outcome, but we did not bother being strict about how we got there." So far as we can tell, that's what we've said throughout but either we didn't say it correctly or people are misremembering, because it seems like everyone stopped reading at the words "No, it was not" and ignored the qualifiers.
Now let's look at the pieces:
Q: Was it reasonable for Hazō to die?
A: Yes, absolutely. Once Hazō let Orochimaru operate on him, Hazō was dead whenever Orochimaru wanted him to be. At an absolute minimum, Orochimaru could simply refuse to do the maintenance work. Ergo, it's completely reasonable for us to have Hazō die.
Q: Is it reasonable that Hazō was at that site, at that time, with the Dog Scroll and his normal seals, and thus Orochimaru gets to steal those things?
A: We are comfortable with it, but we understand that the players would very much like it if Orochimaru did not profit from killing Hazō.
Q: "But wait," we hear from the crowd, "If we had gotten to vote on a plan for that update, we could have taken precautions! Not been there in physical form, have given the Scroll to Mari, etc!"
A: Were those ideas ever seriously discussed before the chapter came out in which they would have been relevant? Because we looked at the plan that was voted in for that chapter and found nothing about taking anti-Orochimaru precautions. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's easy to identify counterplay in the rear-view mirror. The players were focused on different problems – mostly anti-Akatsuki problems – and Orochimaru was a blind spot.
We aren't going to ban all discussion of this topic, but there likely isn't a lot of further value in discussion. It would take a great deal of evidence to change our position, which is that everything that happened in the chapter was fair and the chapter was simulationist in its outcome even if the exact path to get there was not. As always, we are open to being shown that we're wrong but unless there is an absolute slam-dunk argument for that case, we would prefer to simply move on. There's still a lot of worldbuilding to do on the afterlife and we'd like to be focusing our spoons there instead of on re-litigating past events.
With all of that said, a reminder: the quest is becoming more narrativist. That means that whatever challenges Hazō faces, there will be a way to surmount them in the end, if not always in the moment. Disadvantages and negative consequences will be challenges that lead to further development instead of unstoppable barriers. And, of course, now that the afterlife is in play, there is very little cost for dying aside from some time lost. Yes, you will (at least temporarily) lose whatever gear you were carrying and if you were (e.g.) defending an objective at the time of your death then the objective would be captured/destroyed. Even if someone you were bodyguarding is killed, that simply means an extensive rift-dive to retrieve them. Hardly the worst thing ever.
- Location
- [REDACTED]
I want to preface everything I'm about to say, by encouraging y'all to please ignore me if this topic is too annoying. I am super excited that the quest is back, and am more interested in continuing updates and progression rather than spending another update on 702.
I do care slightly less about this than some of the other people. I see the chapter as the Quest equivalent of an en passant in chess.
But... if we're leaning towards more narrativism, then making sure that one of the most narratively important chapters in the quest actually hits right is very important. Imo, the current iteration of 702 does not feel right.
If I was story only reader, then 702 would seem... rushed. Tbh, it could do with some revisions.
I don't mean this to offend. I know the nature of writing web serials and quests means that generally you only get one shot at a chapter. Rewrites and major revisions generally only occur if something has gone terribly wrong, but that's something unique to this particular format of fiction. Not to fiction overall. I'm sure y'all are all aware that extensive editing and revision is common in published fiction, and so doing the same with a chapter of MFD should not feel like an admission of failure.
There will likely be multiple update cycles in the next few months that will have to be delayed for whatever reason. Normally we get non-canon interludes when this happens.
I would encourage y'all to think about taking one of those eventualties as an opportunity to revisit 702, rather than just putting out an interlude. Maybe when resisting the thing feels less like a pain.