Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[Cariyaga]

[X] Action Plan: Catharsis

e: My emotional sadomasochism forces me to support plans that involve near-nervous breakdowns

 

[thamuzz]

Plan has been edited to reorder sections as quoted above.

Click to shrink...

I'm a lot more confident in this version.
I'm still gonna leave Plan Catharsis out there, so people have options.

[X] Action Plan: Catharsis

e: My emotional sadomasochism forces me to support plans that involve near-nervous breakdowns

Click to shrink...

So, I have this impression that the QMs want to write a mental breakdown for Hazou.
I've had that suspicion since the Youthsuit incident (to clarify, I think the incident caused the desire, not the other way round)

 

[Briefvoice]

[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate

@Briefvoice Unsure if it's been brought up already, but if Kagome hears "He'll be treated when we get ... back to leaf," he's going to assume some mind control shenanigans, seriously think we should reword to something along the lines of "The Hokage and our clan will try make sure this doesn't happen again."

Click to shrink...

I had the same thought and reworded it slightly to say "we will deal with this further".

I think the response to Minami bringing up the Cold Stone Killers should be adjusted slightly. Bewilderment doesn't fit; Hazou already knows that Minami knows. It'll come across as insincere and manufactured, the last thing we want right now. Maybe go strait to sorry resignation?

EDIT: Also, given that Kagome is Kagome, might be better to rephrase it to letting go of him if he seems like he's not going to do something stupid, rather than when.

Click to shrink...

Adjusted 'stoen cold killers' section to jump straight to the point.

Whoops, seem to have accidentally deleted the bit about releasing Kagome's hands. Will correct.

 

[Lailoken]

Alright, the bastard offspring of Plan Deescalate and Plan Emotional Outburst.

[X] Action Plan: Catharsis

• Goals
  • Try to avoid anyone getting killed
  • Try to salvage at least some sort of friendly, or at least workable, relationship with Minami
• Emotional Context:
  • You are so damn tired of all this.
  • You don't want to kill your mentor.
  • You're pissed with yourself for breaking opsec again.
  • You're pissed at Kagome for creating this situation.
    • And for trying to murder someone.
  • And you're a bit pissed at Kagome, Keiko and Noburi for blaming you for all this, despite being able to see where they're coming from.
    • The fact that they have a point is feeding into your own anger at yourself. Try to keep that under control.
  • You're pissed at the world being such a fucked up place that you have to guard your words against even the team leader that your team leader and Hokage assigned you.
    • You're not sure how you feel about Jiraiya, but his word, and the fact that you're now a part of Leaf, should count for something
• Actions
  • Overall tone should be 'on the verge of emotional collapse'
  • Address Minami (Bargaining)
    • What should we do?
      • Only options you can see would be to kill or exile your sensei and friend
      • You're desperate for another option
    • That said...
  • Address Kagome (Anger)
    • Setting aside the fact that murdering allies is wrong, because that obviously won't matter to him, the fallout from him succeeding would have been a million times worse than the damage the secret getting would have been.
      • How does he think Jiraiya will react?
    • His decision to do this without consulting the team, because he knew we wouldn't approve, makes this a personal betrayal.
    • AND ANOTHER THING
      • I thought I was done with the 'murder is wrong' thing. Turns out I was wrong.
      • 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.
  • Address Noburi/Keiko (Exhaustion)
    • You're sorry for betraying Noburi's trust and fucking things up again.
    • You just wanted to get a plan right for once.
    • Hell, you were actually trying to practice opsec when you revealed it.
    • For all that you have a clan bloodline, you're not a clan kid. It feels like your loyalty is to your village. Minami is a fellow village nin. It didn't occur to you that you would need to treat her like an enemy.
    • If it's going to be constant paranoia from here on out, what the point (of anything)?
  • Address the team
    • Where do we go from here?
  • Conditional
    • Assuming no-one dies, we remain in the same group as Minami and Minami remains willing to speak with us regarding personal matters
      • Approach Minami regarding how we became Missing-Nin
        • Tone should match Hazou's emotional state, suggesting Maudlin.
    • If Minami brings up Cold Stone Killers
      • It was a fuckup of epic proportions. Akane nearly died due to the fallout.

Click to shrink...

Not a bad start, but if we buy enough time to start laying into Kagome we should probably take this chance to really lay into him. He needs to make the connection to the last time he did this. He needs to understand exactly where he screwed up. He needs his nose rubbed in it until he is a blubbering mess on the floor. He needs to learn, and it would probably be helpful for Hazou to yell at himself for a bit as well.

Watching that happen would probably also go a long way towards confusing Minami into being too unsure to make a first strike.

 

[Dissonance]

[X] Action Plan: Catharsis

 

[Briefvoice]

[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

• If it seems like Manami is about to unleash violence, seek Akane's verbal support in urging Minami to hold off and talk just a little longer.
  
• Ask for everyone allow you to speak
  • Deep breath
  • After warning/getting okay from Minami that you are about to let go, release Kagome's hands if confident he's not going to try and do anything stupid.
    
  • 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 Minami
  • Promise her that you're going to address Kagome's actions, but you want her to understand where this team came from too.
  • Ask Noburi and Keiko, if it's okay if you could tell Minami the story of how we became missing nin. She needs to understand who we are.
    
  • 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. If the others didn't want to reveal too much, tell the story but in more vague terms that would make it difficult to identify it as the swamp village.
    
  • 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 (or "our home village" if being vague) 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.
  • Kagome was living on his own for literally years, justifiably afraid of everyone with only complete paranoia keeping him alive. It doesn't excuse his actions, but you're hoping it helps Minami understand.
    
  • 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 an innocent bystander who did nothing wrong to protect its secrets.
  • 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,
  • feed it 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 Minami expresses outrage about the idea of continuing without some summary punishment of Kagome, plead with her to think of him as someone who is sick, a ninja conditioned to immediate violent response to any threat after too long in constant danger. Promise her that we will deal with this further we get safely back to Leaf.
• When/if the Minami situation is no longer about to explode, explain yourself to Keiko, Noburi, and Kagome regarding revealing clan secrets.
  • 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, but especially Noburi. It was his right to decide what priority to place on concealing his chakra draining ability. You think there's a trade-off worth discussing in the utility of being able to freely use chakra drain versus the benefit of having it as a trump card, but he should have been the one to decide that, not you.
• If possible, resume the mission.

Click to shrink...

Put the bit about releasing Kagome's hands back in.

 

[Dissonance]

When are we counting from? From which post?

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PlanBot usually counts from the last threadmarked comment.

 

[Briefvoice]

PlanBot usually counts from the last threadmarked comment.

Click to shrink...

We were specifically directed by @eaglejarl that vote should be counted from after the "Opsec Info" threadmark.

 

[Restinan]

[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate

 

[thamuzz]

Not a bad start, but if we buy enough time to start laying into Kagome we should probably take this chance to really lay into him. He needs to make the connection to the last time he did this. He needs to understand exactly where he screwed up. He needs his nose rubbed in it until he is a blubbering mess on the floor. He needs to learn, and it would probably be helpful for Hazou to yell at himself for a bit as well.

Watching that happen would probably also go a long way towards confusing Minami into being too unsure to make a first strike.

Click to shrink...

@Velorien @eaglejarl @OliWhail
Would including "epic rant goes here" in a plan be too vague/put too much of a burden on the QMs?

 

[Oneiros]

Can someone please include or write a plan that Includes how if Minami does initiate violence she's probably committing suicide. She's surrounded by 5 ninja of unknown abilities who will all band together to strike her down. If somehow she manages to take all 5 of us down she's just killed the Hokage's children. So her best case scenario is becoming a missing nin

 

[Traiden]

[X] Action Plan: Catharsis
[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate

 

[Briefvoice]

Can someone please include or write a plan that Includes how if Minami does initiate violence she's probably committing suicide. She's surrounded by 5 ninja of unknown abilities who will all band together to strike her down. If somehow she manages to take all 5 of us down she's just killed the Hokage's children. So her best case scenario is becoming a missing nin

Click to shrink...

Minami seems like a woman of reasonable intelligence. If she doesn't already realize that, saying it to her won't convince her. And if she has already come to that conclusion, there's no need to say it.

 

[Oneiros]

Minami seems like a woman of reasonable intelligence. If she doesn't already realize that, saying it to her won't convince her. And if she has already come to that conclusion, there's no need to say it.

Click to shrink...

Minami has proven herself to be a person who responds emotionally. She is clearly acting on instinct here. Making the consequences of her actions real is a valuable tactic. Have to bring out both carrot and stick.

 

[Dissonance]

@Velorien @eaglejarl @OliWhail
Would including "epic rant goes here" in a plan be too vague/put too much of a burden on the QMs?

Click to shrink...

I would think that depends on which QM writes the chapter.

 

[Lailoken]

Something as simple as, "If you want to leave, we won't stop you", might help by giving her an alternative, though it would probably be best to couple it with why what it is an alternative to is a bad idea.

 

[Dissonance]

We were specifically directed by @eaglejarl that vote should be counted from after the "Opsec Info" threadmark.

Click to shrink...

Took a bit to find the quote. Granted, it strongly implies, but doesn't explicitly state that is the plan.

That makes sense. Thanks for the suggestion.

Click to shrink...

Anyway, the first plan after that point is DED, which is caught by planbot, so it's a non-issue.

[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

• If it seems like Manami is about to unleash violence, seek Akane's verbal support in urging Minami to hold off and talk just a little longer.
  
• Ask for everyone allow you to speak
  • Deep breath
  • After warning/getting okay from Minami that you are about to let go, release Kagome's hands if confident he's not going to try and do anything stupid.
    
  • 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 Minami
  • Promise her that you're going to address Kagome's actions, but you want her to understand where this team came from too.
  • Ask Noburi and Keiko, if it's okay if you could tell Minami the story of how we became missing nin. She needs to understand who we are.
    
  • 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. If the others didn't want to reveal too much, tell the story but in more vague terms that would make it difficult to identify it as the swamp village.
    
  • 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 (or "our home village" if being vague) 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.
  • Kagome was living on his own for literally years, justifiably afraid of everyone with only complete paranoia keeping him alive. It doesn't excuse his actions, but you're hoping it helps Minami understand.
    
  • 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 an innocent bystander who did nothing wrong to protect its secrets.
  • 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,
  • feed it 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 Minami expresses outrage about the idea of continuing without some summary punishment of Kagome, plead with her to think of him as someone who is sick, a ninja conditioned to immediate violent response to any threat after too long in constant danger. Promise her that we will deal with this further we get safely back to Leaf.
• When/if the Minami situation is no longer about to explode, explain yourself to Keiko, Noburi, and Kagome regarding revealing clan secrets.
  • 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, but especially Noburi. It was his right to decide what priority to place on concealing his chakra draining ability. You think there's a trade-off worth discussing in the utility of being able to freely use chakra drain versus the benefit of having it as a trump card, but he should have been the one to decide that, not you.
• If possible, resume the mission.

Click to shrink...

(I kinda want to start writing plans just to force terrible puns into titles or do acronyms that are terrible.)

 

[eaglejarl]

TBH, I've been here since January, but I still don't have the schedule down. I just get the email notifications when a new chapter is posted.

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I think @faflec said this, but:

@Velorien's voting closes 12pm London time on Wednesday and the update comes out Thursday.

My voting closes 9am eastern time Saturday for a Sunday delivery. (It's actually 9am of whatever time zone I'm in at the moment, but that's pretty stable at Eastern for the foreseeable future.)

Do the QMs mind if I translate a few chapters from the STORY thread (hopefully more than a few) to the language of the Land of Snow? I'm not going to take any credits and it's not commercial, I just like the story.

Click to shrink...

That would be fantastic! Give us a link when you're done and we'll include it in the info post.

Seriously, this next plan needs to be all about the next five seconds, with a heavy emphasis on the first. If we can get through that, everything else can be pretty casually plastered together. If we can't, nothing else matters.

Right now we need plan, "Don't Start Sword Fights In Explosive Phone Booths".

Click to shrink...

+1 XP for amusing the GM.

 

[Lailoken]

+1 XP for amusing the GM.

Click to shrink...

Ah, good, somebody got it. I just came back after I realized that half the thread probably don't know what phone booths were.

They were sort of like portable toilets, but they also had phones in them. Carrot Top was involved somehow. I don't really remember the details.

 

[Vamair]

That would be fantastic! Give us a link when you're done and we'll include it in the info post.

Click to shrink...

Great, thank you! Will start as soon as I can, then.

 

[Dissonance]

They were sort of like portable toilets, but they also had phones in them. Carrot Top was involved somehow. I don't really remember the details.

Click to shrink...

Don't forget their property of spontaneous temporo-spatial dilation.

 

[Enjou]

Address Minami (Bargaining)

• What should we do?
  • Only options you can see would be to kill or exile your sensei and friend
  • You're desperate for another option
• That said...

Click to shrink...

For this section, it may also be good to add some context as to why the group is lenient on him, because that matters a lot. Something like "Your group is being lenient on Kagome only because he experienced severe emotional trauma and fifteen years of complete social isolation before your group found him, and coming to Leaf has increased his stress greatly. He's just really desperate to make sure the people he's come to care about are safe, and this has affected his judgement very badly."

 

[Oneiros]

(I kinda want to start writing plans just to force terrible puns into titles or do acronyms that are terrible.)

Click to shrink...

Seems to me like you have a perfectly cromulent reason to start writing plans

 

[Velorien]

Do the QMs mind if I translate a few chapters from the STORY thread (hopefully more than a few) to the language of the Land of Snow? I'm not going to take any credits and it's not commercial, I just like the story.

Click to shrink...

I'd be delighted. Be sure to provide links. However, be warned that I am both Russian and a professional translator, so I will know if your translation does not do full justice to the glory of Zabuza.

@Velorien @eaglejarl @OliWhail
Would including "epic rant goes here" in a plan be too vague/put too much of a burden on the QMs?

Click to shrink...

Too vague. However, you're welcome to specify that a speech covering certain specific points should be expressed as an epic rant.

 

[thamuzz]

Based on feedback, a few changes to Plan Catharsis

Alright, the bastard offspring of Plan Deescalate and Plan Emotional Outburst.

[X] Action Plan: Catharsis

• Goals
  • Try to avoid anyone getting killed
  • Try to salvage at least some sort of friendly, or at least workable, relationship with Minami
• Emotional Context:
  • You are so damn tired of all this.
  • You don't want to kill your mentor.
  • You're pissed with yourself for breaking opsec again.
  • You're pissed at Kagome for creating this situation.
    • And for trying to murder someone.
  • And you're a bit pissed at Kagome, Keiko and Noburi for blaming you for all this, despite being able to see where they're coming from.
    • The fact that they have a point is feeding into your own anger at yourself. Try to keep that under control.
  • You're pissed at the world being such a fucked up place that you have to guard your words against even the team leader that your team leader and Hokage assigned you.
    • You're not sure how you feel about Jiraiya, but his word, and the fact that you're now a part of Leaf, should count for something
• Actions
  • Overall tone should be 'on the verge of emotional collapse'
  • Address Minami (Bargaining)
    • What should we do?
      • Only options you can see would be to kill or exile your sensei and friend
      • You're desperate for another option
    • Kagome has seen some shit. He's lost people, spent at least a decade in the woods, and is terrified of losing the team
    • That said...
  • Address Kagome (Anger)
    • Setting aside the fact that murdering allies is wrong, because that obviously won't matter to him, the fallout from him succeeding would have been a million times worse than the damage the secret getting would have been.
      • How does he think Jiraiya will react?
    • His decision to do this without consulting the team, because he knew we wouldn't approve, makes this a personal betrayal.
    • AND ANOTHER THING (initiate epic rant mode)
      • I thought I was done with the 'murder is wrong' thing. Turns out I was wrong.
      • 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.
        • She may be a coddled Leaf nin, but that isn't a bad thing. Isn't the whole point of plan uplift to make a world where people can be more like her and less like us?
        • Do you honestly think that a Leaf nin knowing Noburi's secret is such a security liability that it warrants killing a relative (she's a ninja) innocent? Don't answer that, it doesn't.
        • Conditional: If Kagome brings up her being a security risk due to capture: If you're afraid that she'll be captured and interrogated, then protect her.
        • Do not take the fact that she isn't Mari out on her.
      • 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.
  • Address Noburi/Keiko (Exhaustion)
    • You're sorry for betraying Noburi's trust and fucking things up again.
    • You just wanted to get a plan right for once.
    • Hell, you were actually trying to practice opsec when you revealed it.
    • For all that you have a clan bloodline, you're not a clan kid. It feels like your loyalty is to your village. Minami is a fellow village nin. It didn't occur to you that you would need to treat her like an enemy.
    • If it's going to be constant paranoia from here on out, what the point (of anything)?
  • Address the team
    • Where do we go from here?
  • Conditional
    • Assuming no-one dies, we remain in the same group as Minami and Minami remains willing to speak with us regarding personal matters
      • Approach Minami regarding how we became Missing-Nin
        • Tone should match Hazou's emotional state, suggesting Maudlin.
    • If Minami brings up Cold Stone Killers
      • It was a fuckup of epic proportions. Akane nearly died due to the fallout.

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