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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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If the Black hunter is a ninja then he should be able to hedge. Therefor he is able to infiltrate the village. Does this village have any people that come regularly, but don't live here? If I were him I would be trying just as hard to find information about us as we are about him. Any way we can use that? Do we have enough awareness to see though a hedge?
 
fictionfan said:
Do we have enough awareness to see though a hedge?
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I guess it depends on what kind of hedge it is. If it's really thick and has lots of leaves we might have trouble. I suppose we could always stand on tiptoes and just peek over it, that sounds like the smarter option.

But yeah, with Inoue around I seriously doubt the hunter could pass himself as one of the villagers. At least not for long.
 
[X] Plan Contact Hunter
- Investigate and find some chakra-monster that is threatening the village that only ninja could take out.
- Take it out, in exchange for nothing whatsoever. Similar to what BH did, instead give all (or at least the majority) of the useful bits of it to the village.
- Leave a note as specified below in any sort of code that only a ninja would recognize on some body part that could feasibly be tested for poison. This is our first attempt at contact with the BH.
- Follow the instructions of the note, without deception, because it seems as though BH is aiming to be something of a guardian for this village and might not be 100% evil.

- Note contents:

We mean no harm, and we would like to see the people of this village as well as the rest of this nation prosper. We recognize your protection of them and would like to coordinate with you.

To acknowledge this, we will send a clone to #{location} at #{time}. If you are unwilling to talk but don't mind our presence, simply dismiss the clone (without attacking it), and we will leave you be while continuing with what we were already doing. If you are unwilling to talk and wish for us to leave, dismiss the clone by attacking it, and we will do so. If you are willing to talk, send instructions on where you would like to meet with the clone and have it return to us intact.

[X] Correct Inoue-sensei about identical-drawing plan thingy
- Instead of three identical drawings, make three distinct unique drawings, so that a ninja cannot steal one of the other two to imitate us (pending Noburi approval, as usual)
 
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@Icehawk78

We've already done the first step when we killed the waterbugs. If villagers' first response is "run away" they'd have no business actually fighting them but a ninja would be able to.

As for a gift I get the feeling he doesn't especially care about the villagers since he's willing to steal form them and kill them, or at least "disappear" them. So we should probably supplement what we use with something useful he can't get easily, like cloth, pottery, iron...If he were willing to steal from villagers he probably doesn't get out to the big cities much so these gifts would all be viable.
 
faflec said:
We've already done the first step when we killed the waterbugs. If villagers' first response is "run away" they'd have no business actually fighting them but a ninja would be able to.
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Didn't we get paid for those? Or am I misremembering?

faflec said:
As for a gift I get the feeling he doesn't especially care about the villagers since he's willing to steal form them and kill them, or at least "disappear" them. So we should probably supplement what we use with something useful he can't get easily, like cloth, pottery, iron...If he were willing to steal from villagers he probably doesn't get out to the big cities much so these gifts would all be viable.
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I must have missed the part about killing/disappearing them. My read of the "stealing from villagers" was more generous - he's a ninja and is obviously going to be more able to detect threats from the surroundings than random villagers, so if he develops a habit of "scare them into dropping their shit and running when he appears" then they have a better survival chance than if they tried to run from, say, a wolf, while carrying a large load of clay. After all, they're civilians, so if he's protective of them, he's might be effectively treating them as fragile children.

It's possibly wrong, but I have a vague feeling that he's more like "guardian angel" than "protective slaughterhouse owner".
 
@Icehawk78

If we got paid for killing the waterbugs it wasn't written. The best I can see is us being offered some fish/prawn meal. As for the Black Hunter...
"Well, there's the black hunter," Fukio said. "No one knows what it is; sometimes people have seen a flicker of movement in the woods, but that's it. Those that turns around and run the other way usually make it out alive as long as they drop whatever they're carrying. Those that do anything else generally don't come back."
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You're right in that your interpretation is a possibility...but if he's an actual nice guy he'd beat the stuff off the civilians and let them run for it.
 
faflec said:
@Icehawk78

If we got paid for killing the waterbugs it wasn't written. The best I can see is us being offered some fish/prawn meal. As for the Black Hunter...


You're right in that your interpretation is a possibility...but if he's an actual nice guy he'd beat the stuff off the civilians and let them run for it.
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Or, you know, that guy was covering for him and told a scary story to make people keep out of the "Black Hunters" territory.

Those children last update did not sound scared of him at all, after all.
 
faflec said:
@Chronic I refuse to believe Inoue failed an Awareness roll against a civilian.
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She might not have looked out for it, or she thought there was something fishy but did not think it was serious enough to worry about. If the children of the village are openly talking amonst each other about Black Hunter and praising him it is incredibly unlikely that he is robbing the village or killing its inhabitants.

@eaglejarl, @Velorien, @Jackercracks , is the Black Hunter robbing and killing the villagers that go into the forest? Do we think that the information we got when coming into the village is accurate in light of recent information?
 
faflec said:
You're right in that your interpretation is a possibility...but if he's an actual nice guy he'd beat the stuff off the civilians and let them run for it.
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It could be more of a behavioural adjustment practice - he scares people into not wandering too far out so that if he's not there to beat away scary forest monsters, the villagers don't have to learn their lesson by dying, they just need to be slightly scared enough of transgressing the boundaries he's given them to avoid getting in a situation where he'd need to save them anyhow.

My guess is that he's also beating up the monster to keep the villagers safe, but encourages telling scary stories to keep everyone safer. The younger kids have grown up with him being there and thus are less frightened of him, but the older villagers who were likely around before he showed up are more scared because he had to take a period of establishing boundaries while adopting the village.
 
What do we get from making contact with Black Hunter, and is all of the effort worth it for getting a leave me alone in words and not bombs?

I don't see anything in it for him.
 
ClawClawBite said:
What do we get from making contact with Black Hunter, and is all of the effort worth it for getting a leave me alone in words and not bombs?

I don't see anything in it for him.
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We don't know much about him right now. He could have all kinds of wants. We do have a few things we can bargain like access to various supplies that are never going to show up in a backwards village like this by themselves, or recent information about the state of the Elemental Nations. Also, i think its important to establish mutual courtesy here.

We want to return to this village in the future, otherwise we wouldn't have arranged for an identification sign. Black Hunter apparently wants to be left alone. It is possible that we will run into each other again, but without establishing some sort of agreement beforehand chances are it will go just like the last time we met - and this time someone might actually die. That is not in our interest.
 
ClawClawBite said:
What do we get from making contact with Black Hunter, and is all of the effort worth it for getting a leave me alone in words and not bombs?

I don't see anything in it for him.
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All of the following assumes that my interpretation of BH's motivations (ie guardian angel of this town) is correct. If I'm wrong, then some or all may be invalid.

Benefits for us making contact: If we manage to convince him to help us and we can help him, that gives us another partner who is capable of operating at "not instantly slaughtered by Inoue when she focuses on him"-level, as well as connecting with another ninja who may share similar aspirations of something other than pure ninja-superiority-complex with us.

Benefits for him making contact: If we manage to convince him we share values, he gains at least a doubling (or more!) in protective abilities, allowing the village to prosper and grow beyond where he has to protect it alone. Also, companionship, someone who can complement his abilities, etc.
 
PSA: I added two short lines to the update to clarify a couple of things. Virtual cookies to anyone who spots them.

faflec said:
@eaglejarl @AugSphere @Velorien @Jackercracks

--How windy is the path the caravan is taking? I.e., Can we 'shortcut' a path that gives us the excuse of arriving at a town/village when they do, because they took the long way around/stopped for several days to trade?
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Not super-windy but yes, you could get ahead of them.

faflec said:
--Is it possible for us to create chakra ink; i.e., what are the requirements we know of?
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Making chakra ink is about at the same level as doing a mail merge in Word; it's not something that everyone knows, but it's not a secret and it's not hard to find out if you want to know. Hazou is familiar with the method, and the others might be as well.

faflec said:
--Do we know if Aya's story of being a Lightning-nin dropout is possible, given what we know of Lightning's educational system and what Mist would do to dropouts like that?
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In Mist, the first year of ninja school is set up to wash out anyone who isn't going to be able to cut it. It's the non-secret stuff -- physical conditioning, basic taijutsu, very basic weapons, obedience to orders, self-discipline, verifying you have sufficient chakra capacity and control, etc. People who wash out in the first year are basically civilians with some military training -- they can win most barfights, they know some basics about
wilderness survival, and etc but they aren't a danger to their village and no special restrictions are placed on them.

If you wash out AFTER your first year, things are very different. At that point you've started getting special diets, learning real secrets / important things, etc.

You don't know how it works in Lightning, but it's plausible that Aya is what she says.


faflec said:
--Are any of the villagers here willing to trade food (meat) for paper? Actually, can we have a general idea of what these people have, besides pottery-items, fish, and shit-quality iron?
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We'll get back to you on this one.

Icehawk78 said:
Didn't we get paid for those? Or am I misremembering?
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You haven't been paid for specific tasks, but you've been paid for all the stuff you've done in general. So, not "hey, thanks for killing the waterbugs, have some clothes" but instead "hey thanks for killing waterbugs and guarding the clay harvesters and hunting the forest and etc, have basically anything you like."

I
 
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"There's probably a bandit, and he's probably trying to put a place together, and the rest of it is probably crap. Still, could be an interesting place to look. In the meantime, I found out something interesting about our ninja friend: according to a snotty young lady named Nanami, the so-called black hunter has contact with the villagers other than killing them.
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Jackercracks said:
They were referring to different things. Hunter-san is a person, Black Hunter... well the villagers don't know exactly what it looks like because they keep dying.
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In that case, what about this quote:

eaglejarl said:
In the meantime, I found out something interesting about our ninja friend: according to a snotty young lady named Nanami, the so-called black hunter has contact with the villagers other than killing them. Apparently they were having a problem with a chakra bear; he killed it and left the carcass on the edge of the woods for them.
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Inoue seems to think that the Hunter-san that the child was talking about is the Black Hunter. If there are two Hunters, shouldn't she tell us that?
 
Chronic said:
Now you've completely thrown me for a loop. I thought we had established that the Black Hunter was that ninja we ran into in the forest? The village children even called him Hunter-san.
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There has apparently been some confusion amongst the GMs about what the BH was supposed to be. Based on what I wrote, yes, the BH is the ninja. Apparently there was an earlier idea that it was supposed to be a chakra monster, but I didn't get that memo. Hazards of having four GMs in different time zones.
 
faflec said:
"There's probably a bandit, and he's probably trying to put a place together, and the rest of it is probably crap. Still, could be an interesting place to look. In the meantime, I found out something interesting about our ninja friend: according to a snotty young lady named Nanami, the so-called black hunter has contact with the villagers other than killing them.
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Nailed it.
 
A lot of people are talking about how trying to court the Black Hunter could be a waste of time and we should do something else. So why don't we do both? Let's try to get into contact with the Black Hunter the way @Icehawk78 talks about, and at the same time make plans to move to a nearby village like this one. We can go, establish relations and help out like we did here, and go back whenever we feel like it; this way we get the benefits of boosting experience via creative solutions/new activities while at the same time trying to get a huge boost by gaining the attention of the Black Hunter.
 
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