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"Minami is my original character she makes a crystal that shoots lasers and she can see out of it pls don't copy"
 
Except for Kagome's dreams :p
Well it's more of a...

He just kinda...

Well does Hazou know that? :p


Actually, me objecting to that as an accepted swear again, this time with science history facts bullshit!

The term 'damn it' refers to a condemnation of something. In the context of 'god damn it' it refers to an all-powerful deity condemning a soul to a rather unsavory afterlife. Or something. If you damn an item, does it go to object hell?

Substituting 'sage' for god in the swear due to the lack of religeous idols doesn't actually make sense, as the Sage was merely a very powerful and wise human(...type thing) like Buddha, rather than an omnipotent god with power over souls and the afterlife.

I don't believe anybody would ask the peace loving sage to damn somebody or something, so the phrase 'sage damn it' would never have come into circulation.

With the lack of firm belief in any specific afterlife, most notably the negative hell equivalent of one, I don't think 'damn it/you' would be used either.

I think a more likely swear to use in times of frustration might be 'curses!', such that one wishes misfortune on another (or is reacting to misfortune in their own life).

'Curse it all' or even 'Condemnation!' might be acceptable swears in Narutoverse. 'Sage damn it' is likely not.

And of course, dumbutt or stinker or poophead are all applicable because those are indications of gross biological functions, which even ninjas must deal with. And of course being called poop is an unflattering insult.
 
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*warning: needless shitposting follows*

Substituting 'sage' for god in the swear due to the lack of religeous idols doesn't actually make sense, as the Sage was merely a very powerful and wise human(...type thing) like Buddha, rather than an omnipotent god with power over souls and the afterlife.
Maybe, but according to Kagome, the Sage is actually immortal, and can also bring the dead back to life. Being able to bring a dead person back into being and torment them for eternity seems like a fitting analog :p

I don't believe anybody would ask the peace loving sage to damn somebody or something, so the phrase 'sage damn it' would never have come into circulation.
I think Kagome blames half the world's problems on the Sage?

And of course being called poop is an unflattering insult.
...
*remembers a fellow hiker named Poopsmaster*
She certainly didn't mind the name :p
 
*warning: needless shitposting follows*


Maybe, but according to Kagome, the Sage is actually immortal, and can also bring the dead back to life. Being able to bring a dead person back into being and torment them for eternity seems like a fitting analog :p


I think Kagome blames half the world's problems on the Sage?
And yet Kagome isn't the one using those swears.
...
*remembers a fellow hiker named Poopsmaster*
She certainly didn't mind the name :p
Wait wut
...
Like irl? Neat.
 
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[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate

Objectives:
1. Survive
2. Deescalate the situation to where there's no imminent threat of violence
3. Apologize and explain yourself
4. Express flat-out disgust about "legitimately" killing to protect your secrets

  • Ask for everyone allow you to speak
    • Release grip on Kagome when it seems sure he's not going to try anything stupid
    • Deep breath
    • Not moving hands too fast, give Minami the Nara hand sign for 'you need to hear this'
  • Explain yourself to Keiko, Noburi, and Kagome
    • Ask everyone to bear with you, you know Kagome's actions are the most important thing to be addressed, but you'd like to talk about the lead-up.
    • Tell everyone that while you're technically a Kurosawa, your mother raised you as an exile outside the clan. You might have a bloodline, but you weren't raised as part of a clan.
    • You were always taught that your village was the most important thing and where you owed your loyalty.
    • So while you understand clan secrets in your head and we've talked about it... you don't really get it in your gut.
    • When you joined Leaf you figured from now on you owed it your loyalty, and you were thinking about ways to use everyone's abilities to best complete the mission, like you always do.
    • The new clan barely seemed real; you weren't thinking at all about it as something whose secrets were to be protected from the village you were supposed to be loyal to now. That was a mistake.
    • Apologize deeply to all three of them.
    • Ask them, if it's okay, if you could tell Minami the story of the Village Hidden in the Swamp. She needs to understand.
  • Explain yourself to Minami
    • Promise her again that you're going to address Kagome's actions, but you want her to understand where this team came from too.
    • Unless the others protested, tell Minami the story of the Village Hidden in the Swamp and how it came to be and how it ended.
    • Explain you didn't set out to become missing-nin... it was more done to you, and all of a sudden you were in a situation where there didn't seem like there were other options.
    • But objectively now you've got to tell her honestly... Mist is a horrible place and Leaf seems a lot nicer. In case she wondered if it was all propaganda, it's not.
    • Kagome's story is his own to tell... enough of revealing comrades' secrets. But you can tell Minami that when you found him he was lost and alone after a long exile in the woods, and if he owed some penalty for leaving his home village, you think he's paid it.
    • You want to believe in the ideals of the Village Hidden in the Leaf and the Will of Fire. It seems like a beautiful thing, even if humans are always bound to fall short.
  • Time to talk about Kagome's actions
    • Get mad.
    • Kagome, enough of this "stinkers" shit. That's the word he always uses when it's time to stop treating someone like a human being and you're sick of it.
    • Kagome calls Minami a 'dumbbutt' so he don't have to feel bad about what he tried to do. Well it was attempted murder and it was wrong.
    • Everyone on this team has done things that are wrong because we thought it was that or die. Okay. We're all ninjas, all killers, all terrible.
    • But this wasn't 'do or die'. This was trying to murder a fellow member of our new village because you thought there might be some danger from something she knew under hypothetical circumstances far in the future.
    • Fuck that. And you know what, fuck the idea that it's "legitimate" for a clan to kill to protect its secrets, especially someone who didn't ask to be told them and did nothing wrong.
    • If Kagome ever, ever, tries some shit like this again, do you know what Hazou will do?
    • He will personally drag Kagome back into the woods and live with him in exile, serving Leaf by occasionally passing back sealing research. Because I love you sensei, and if taking you away from everyone else is the only way to keep you alive I'll do it. Please don't- Hazou hates living in the woods.
  • Back to Minami
    • If she needs it to feel safe in our company, Hazou will be her hostage.
    • But weird as it is to say after all this, he would rather be her comrade.
  • Let everyone digest and respond
  • If possible, resume the mission.

On explaining ourselves to Noburi, I think we should focus a bit more on how we are constantly planning as hard as possible to make sure that everybody comes out alive, and it hasn't really sunk in yet that that's no longer quite as necessary. I would suggest something along the lines of:

When Hazou was deciding what to do and what plans to put forward he immediately optimized for "how do I make sure none of my friends dies today" to the exclusion of all else. We were so mono-focused on making sure nobody died even if things went horribly wrong that we simply didn't notice that we were giving up someone else's secret in exchange for that. Hazou still hasn't properly adjusted to the fact that we're no longer missing nin and he no longer has to constantly think up and execute any plan he can think of to increase the team's short term chances of survival.

I think this explanation works because it's both an in character way for Hazou to have made this mistake and also probably the reason the thread made it. That's obviously a very bad blind-spot to have, and we've wronged Noburi and the rest of the clan greatly through our carelessness. Hazou should probably be relegated to punching things, inventing seals, and on request making plans to run by the clan.

I also believe that we shouldn't actually use the term "Hidden Swamp" before we get confirmation that telling the story is okay with out teammates. Maybe even after. Instead we should probably ask if it's okay to tell the story of how we became missing nin.

You should probably add a section for explaining why Minami knows we're the Cold Stone Killers, if someone else brings it up. I think we should say that Hazou thought she already knew, having already known we were Mist missing nin who had killed one Jonin and dropped a building on another. Hazou thought it was sufficiently obvious that she would have already figured it out, and that explaining how the entire situation was supposed to be a simple scroll copying mission that had spiraled out of control might put her more at ease, and make it less likely she would view us as dangerously unstable enemies.
 
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You should probably add a section for explaining why Minami knows we're the Cold Stone Killers, if someone else brings it up. I think we should say that Hazou thought she already knew, having already known we were Mist missing nin who had killed one Jonin and dropped a building on another. Hazou thought it was sufficiently obvious that she would have already figured it out, and that explaining how the entire situation was supposed to be a simple scroll copying mission that had spiraled out of control might put her more at ease, and make it less likely she would view us as dangerously unstable enemies.
This is almost-completely irrelevant to the current situation. I mean, yeah, it gives her more ammunition against us, but.
 
This is almost-completely irrelevant to the current situation. I mean, yeah, it gives her more ammunition against us, but.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next update will consist of scenes past us defusing the situation with Minami. I wouldn't be surprised if, after the situation is defused, we get chewed out by our team. If that happens, I think it's somewhat likely that someone will ask us why Minami suddenly knows that we're the Cold Stone Killers. I don't think we should bring it up, but having a section to address it if someone else does seems like a good contingency to have.
 
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The main thing that could blow this up is if Minami isn't willing to listen to a long explanation and just attacks us, but... (shrug) I really don't know what to do about that. She's going to listen or she won't.

I think you have a good start in your plan, especially with making the Nara hand sign. I think it would be beneficial for people to reread the relevant passage:

Then she put her palms together, hands pointing upwards, in front of her heart. "'Please listen to me.' It's the most important sign in the language, or at least I think so.

"It's what you use when someone's doing that processing thing and you think you've got something important enough to bother them with. But it's also what you do when you really, really need to be heard. That might be because a Nara's so into what they're saying that they've stopped paying attention to you. Or because they're getting so emotional that you can't get a word in edgeways. Or when you need them to listen, just listen, to what you're saying, because you have thoughts and feelings too.

"Sorry," Minami said awkwardly. "Too personal."

That description Minami gave us sounds a lot like what we really, really need from her right now, and clearly has significant personal importance to her that may give her pause if she sees it.

What I would add is that Hazō should implore her ASAP to remember that Jiraiya trusts us, and that Hazō has just acted to save her life, so please give us a chance to explain ourselves.

Additionally, I would propose changing one of the bullet points:
  • Ask them, if it's okay, if you could tell Minami the story of the Village Hidden in the Swamp how we became missing nin. She needs to understand.
That phrasing doesn't reveal any sensitive information before our team has given approval. Any mentions of VHitS after that point should be fine, since it should only come up if the team has agreed to tell the story.
 
Are we okay with characterizing Hazou as something of a tormented pacifist? Because I feel like that, ala this:

"I hate killing, okay?! There's seven -- now eight, after last village -- people that I'm responsible for the death of and almost every night I have nightmares about them. I get it, I have to sometimes, and I don't regret doing so when it was to save my team's lives, but that isn't what this was, Kagome. I'm not fighting for a world where people are killed for clan secrets! And I am sorry for that, Noburi -- you damned well should be upset at me. Kagome, I understand you have a hard time trusting people, and it's one thing for you to be cautious of people, lay mines around your sleeping bag -- hell, I'd even understand if you... [visibly composing self] pasted someone that surprised you. I won't... I won't support them killing you or putting you in a sweatshop, but you do need to understand that that this kind of thing has consequences."

Could probably be one of our better options for salvaging this.
 
Also: did we seriously have "describe the Hot Springs incident" in the last plan? I don't remember seeing it.
Before Minami heads to bed have Hazou ask Minami about leadership advice
  • Hazou only has experience with team uplift
  • When he has to interact with people not on the team he has a history of making a mess of things
  • Specifically how he messed up in taking the hot springs mission. Then messed up in planning how to do the mission

It's more the fact that you decided to keep so much from canon Naruto. The clan structure. The relative position of all of the hidden villages. The fact that ninja apparently constantly plot how to kill each other even when they are allies. The rampant paranoia about letting your allies know about techniques that they literally can't copy. The Uchiha massacre still happening. Akatsuki still being exactly the same and still be based in rain. Leaf being the good village. Just feels to me that you decided to be beholden to canon to much and not really try to work out what the actual dynamic of the world should be.
Like sending scrubs to kill Jounin is stupid dumb. This is a rational fic so no one should blatantly pick up an idiot ball but that pretty much it. Then when people point out why this stuff is dumb you claim oh I wish the world was different. When you literally sit up the starting point of the world.
The thing is, the canon Narutoverse is deeply, fundamentally irrational. The fact that ninja communicate by messenger birds while having real-time satellite uplink isn't just a funny example, it's a statement of the level of rationality Kishimoto had when he designed the setting as a whole. That level, that mode of thinking, is the bedrock of the canon Narutoverse.

If we made it a project to create a rational setting from the ground up, it would be impossible for us to end up with something that remotely resembled what Kishimoto made. We could have made a generic "ninja battle wizards" setting, but at the point where we decided to make it a Naruto quest, we ended up with a hard limit on how rational things like politics and society could get.

Hazou's bloodline is literally "can perfectly replicate anything he deems necessary".
No, no it isn't. We've been over this many times. Hazō's bloodline is perfect muscle memory. If he has made a certain physical movement, he can make that same movement again without error on any subsequent occasion. You can get creative with it, but the basic ability is very narrowly defined.

Does she not already know that we come from Mist? She's calling us by our actual names and a Wakahisa should be pretty obvious anyway. Aren't at least the names of the clans from various villages common knowledge?
Public knowledge =/= common knowledge, and Minami by her own admission hasn't even been outside the Fire Country before. By the same token, it's not like Hazō could list off, say, the top ten most prominent clans of Hidden Rock.

Substituting 'sage' for god in the swear due to the lack of religeous idols doesn't actually make sense, as the Sage was merely a very powerful and wise human(...type thing) like Buddha, rather than an omnipotent god with power over souls and the afterlife.
He's the Sage of Six Paths, which refers to the six worlds through which souls travel on the wheel of reincarnation. Setting aside the vast religious mythos that has grown up around him after a thousand years, it is entirely plausible that someone like him could throw your soul into whatever world he liked through ninjutsu alone.

Edit: And if you think the Buddha isn't worshipped as a god in many countries of the world despite having explicitly forbidden his followers to do so, then you haven't been paying attention to world religion in the last 2500 years.
 
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Oh, one other thing:

  • Embarrassingly, I don't recall whether the denominator in the (roll - roll) / (dice + dice)^0.65 formula is based on base dice or total dice.

If anyone can find an answer to this, either in the rules docs or in a GM post, I will happily award 10 XP to the entire party. It's an important question and I would gladly pay XP to not have to find the answer.

Unsure if anyone else replied already (still in the process of reading through stuff), I believe this might be what you are looking for?

And in support of Hazo and protest against OPSEC, I will even tell you how I found it so you can do it yourself next time. :p

Googled this string:
site:https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/marked-for-death-a-rational-naruto-quest.24481/ "(dice + dice)^0.65"

(Even if this isn't exactly the correct post, the search string gives you tons of posts that use that syntax to find the one you are looking for.)
 
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Hi there!

 
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telling them to have thicker skins is unkind and disrespectful.
Man, not cool. Maybe it's unkind, yeah, but I said it exactly because I respect them, so I believe they can take the truth, so don't say who I do and don't respect, that's unkind and disrespectful.

Also words of wisdom for people writing stuff on teh interwebs : If you make a chapter of a thing, and lots of people become meaniepats because they don't like it, it's because they care, the thing you made is important to them in some way. You can get all upset at all the mean things, but you could take, even the meanest thing as a compliment, because that guy cared enough to write a 5 paragraph thing about you being a poopyhead for killing off a character.

I mean, I would never shitpost in a thread I don't care about. And I mean it, all three of you silly author people.
 
Man, not cool. Maybe it's unkind, yeah, but I said it exactly because I respect them, so I believe they can take the truth, so don't say who I do and don't respect, that's unkind and disrespectful.

Also words of wisdom for people writing stuff on teh interwebs : If you make a chapter of a thing, and lots of people become meaniepats because they don't like it, it's because they care, the thing you made is important to them in some way. You can get all upset at all the mean things, but you could take, even the meanest thing as a compliment, because that guy cared enough to write a 5 paragraph thing about you being a poopyhead for killing off a character.

I mean, I would never shitpost in a thread I don't care about. And I mean it, all three of you silly author people.
I think you're drawing meaning where it's not intended to be. That comment was made when multiple people were ragging on the QMs very discourteously -- at least one of which came into the thread specifically to do so, having not read it before, and they only stopped when a mod came in. Additionally, the context of the word "disrespectful" as Veedrac was using it is not the kind of context where it is up to the person speaking. In that context, whether something is respectful or not is not up to the person saying it to decide. Just like you don't get to decide whether calling someone names is rude (e: or playful teasing, or a fond nickname), or tell someone who's clinically depressed (or just having a bad day!!!) that they have no reason to be sad, it is not for you to decide whether something is respectful or not. Veedrac, by my reading, was attempting to get across that from their modelling of the QMs it would come across as disrespectful.

Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, being upset about how things turn out is not an excuse for such behaviour, and I believe it is wrong to expect that someone who puts great time and effort into something -- as the QMs quite clearly do for this -- to not take offense to overt rudeness and deprecation toward their work.

On a personal level, when I've done writing myself, I have always been terrified to share my work for fear of just that kind of behaviour. Shit sucks. I don't want people I care about to feel that way.

CCNJ Postscript: Italics for emphasis, I'm not super upset or anything.
 
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Idea for our current situation:

Hazou asks Keiko to summon [a pangolin; Pandour?] to witness an oath made to Minami that if Kagome makes a move against her, he'll kill himself. (Is there any problem suicide can't solve? :D)
 
Per requests, I have updated the plan in various minor ways. Changes in red.

[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate

Objectives:
1. Survive
2. Deescalate the situation to where there's no imminent threat of violence
3. Apologize and explain yourself
4. Express flat-out disgust about "legitimately" killing to protect your secrets

  • Ask for everyone allow you to speak
    • Release grip on Kagome when it seems sure he's not going to try anything stupid
    • Deep breath
    • Not moving hands too fast, give Minami the Nara hand sign for 'you need to hear this' of palms together, hands pointing upwards, in front of heart
  • Explain yourself to Keiko, Noburi, and Kagome
    • Ask everyone to bear with you, you know Kagome's actions are the most important thing to be addressed, but you'd like to talk about the lead-up.
    • Tell everyone that while you're technically a Kurosawa, your mother raised you as an exile outside the clan. You might have a bloodline, but you weren't raised as part of a clan.
    • You were always taught that your village was the most important thing and where you owed your loyalty.
    • So while you understand clan secrets in your head and we've talked about it... you don't really get it in your gut.
    • When you joined Leaf you figured from now on you owed it your loyalty, and you were thinking about ways to use everyone's abilities to best complete the mission, like you always do.
    • You were planning for "How do I make sure none of my friends dies today" to the exclusion of all else. You were so focused on 'make this mission a success' you didn't notice you were giving up someone else's secret in exchange for that.
    • The new clan barely seemed real; you weren't thinking at all about it as something whose secrets were to be protected from the village you were supposed to be loyal to now. That was a mistake.
    • Apologize deeply to all three of them.
    • Ask them, if it's okay, if you could tell Minami the story of how we became missing nin. She needs to understand.
  • Explain yourself to Minami
    • Promise her again that you're going to address Kagome's actions, but you want her to understand where this team came from too.
    • Unless the others protested, tell Minami the story of the Village Hidden in the Swamp and how it came to be and how it ended.
    • Explain you didn't set out to become missing-nin... it was more done to you, and all of a sudden you were in a situation where there didn't seem like there were other options.
    • But objectively now you've got to tell her honestly... Mist is a horrible place and Leaf seems a lot nicer. In case she wondered if it was all propaganda, it's not.
    • Kagome's story is his own to tell... enough of revealing comrades' secrets. But you can tell Minami that when you found him he was lost and alone after a long exile in the woods, and if he owed some penalty for leaving his home village, you think he's paid it.
    • You want to believe in the ideals of the Village Hidden in the Leaf and the Will of Fire. It seems like a beautiful thing, even if humans are always bound to fall short.
  • Time to talk about Kagome's actions
    • Get mad.
    • Kagome, enough of this "stinkers" shit. That's the word he always uses when it's time to stop treating someone like a human being and you're sick of it.
    • Kagome calls Minami a 'dumbbutt' so he don't have to feel bad about what he tried to do. Well it was attempted murder and it was wrong.
    • Everyone on this team has done things that are wrong because we thought it was that or die. Okay. We're all ninjas, all killers, all terrible.
    • But this wasn't 'do or die'. This was trying to murder a fellow member of our new village because you thought there might be some danger from something she knew under hypothetical circumstances far in the future.
    • Fuck that. And you know what, fuck the idea that it's "legitimate" for a clan to kill to protect its secrets, especially someone who didn't ask to be told them and did nothing wrong.
    • If Kagome ever, ever, tries some shit like this again, do you know what Hazou will do?
    • He will personally drag Kagome back into the woods and live with him in exile, serving Leaf by occasionally passing back sealing research. Because I love you sensei, and if taking you away from everyone else is the only way to keep you alive I'll do it. Please don't- Hazou hates living in the woods.
  • Back to Minami
    • If she needs it to feel safe in our company, Hazou will be her hostage.
    • But weird as it is to say after all this, he would rather be her comrade.
  • Let everyone digest and respond
    • If Minami brings up the 'Stone Cold Killer' thing, express bewilderment, then sorry resignation that you've blown yet another secret.
    • Feed the whole thing into the 'we had absolutely no idea what we were doing as missing nin' narrative you've been talking about. No one on the team understood anything about diplomatic neutral zones. Literally some guy in a bar hired you to steal a message, and when you tried 'suddenly jounin' and from then on you were just trying to stay alive.
  • If possible, resume the mission.

On explaining ourselves to Noburi, I think we should focus a bit more on how we are constantly planning as hard as possible to make sure that everybody comes out alive, and it hasn't really sunk in yet that that's no longer quite as necessary. I would suggest something along the lines of:

When Hazou was deciding what to do and what plans to put forward he immediately optimized for "how do I make sure none of my friends dies today" to the exclusion of all else. We were so mono-focused on making sure nobody died even if things went horribly wrong that we simply didn't notice that we were giving up someone else's secret in exchange for that. Hazou still hasn't properly adjusted to the fact that we're no longer missing nin and he no longer has to constantly think up and execute any plan he can think of to increase the team's short term chances of survival.

Added something along those lines.

You should probably add a section for explaining why Minami knows we're the Cold Stone Killers, if someone else brings it up. I think we should say that Hazou thought she already knew, having already known we were Mist missing nin who had killed one Jonin and dropped a building on another. Hazou thought it was sufficiently obvious that she would have already figured it out, and that explaining how the entire situation was supposed to be a simple scroll copying mission that had spiraled out of control might put her more at ease, and make it less likely she would view us as dangerously unstable enemies.

Hazou had no idea he was leaking info their group was the 'Stone Cold Killers' because it hasn't really sunk in how big a deal that is to everyone. But I did put in something.

I wouldn't be surprised if the next update will consist of scenes past us defusing the situation with Minami. I wouldn't be surprised if, after the situation is defused, we get chewed out by our team. If that happens, I think it's somewhat likely that someone will ask us why Minami suddenly knows that we're the Cold Stone Killers. I don't think we should bring it up, but having a section to address it if someone else does seems like a good contingency to have.

Contingency in place.

Additionally, I would propose changing one of the bullet points:
  • Ask them, if it's okay, if you could tell Minami the story of the Village Hidden in the Swamp how we became missing nin. She needs to understand.
That phrasing doesn't reveal any sensitive information before our team has given approval. Any mentions of VHitS after that point should be fine, since it should only come up if the team has agreed to tell the story.

Okay, made that mod.
 
Idea for our current situation:

Hazou asks Keiko to summon [a pangolin; Pandour?] to witness an oath made to Minami that if Kagome makes a move against her, he'll kill himself. (Is there any problem suicide can't solve? :D)

I'm currently mulling over a plan myself that would get Kagome to stand down for sure that would involve almost just that - threaten to commit ritual suicide in front of Minami's clan as recompense if Kagome tries to hurt her for any other reason than she's trying to kill the team (current situation excluded since it's self-defense) and he'll swear it on his father's grave. He'll give reasoning that he knows that Kagome would lay down his life to protect the team, and Hazou is no different, even if that means protecting the team and Kagome himself from Kagome's impulsive urge to blow up every threat even when it's not appropriate.
 
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