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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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eaglejarl said:
Update is going to be very late tonight or possibly very late Monday night since I may have to finish writing it after work tomorrow. Alternatively, maybe I'll just say screw it, stop mid-battle, and let Velorien sort it out on Thursday. There are way too many people in this fight; figuring out what all of them can do and then doing all the rolls is a complete pain in the ass.

Whatever. Don't expect anything soon.
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Cariyaga said:
Dammit. Sorry I couldn't get my dice roller out for you.
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I too apologize for not getting my battle simulator finished in time. I'll try to have it up before the next battle though :)
 
Clearly combat is difficult to run because you don't have enough practice. So to help you out we should have Hazō solve all of his problems through violence
 
eaglejarl said:
Update is going to be very late tonight or possibly very late Monday night since I may have to finish writing it after work tomorrow. Alternatively, maybe I'll just say screw it, stop mid-battle, and let Velorien sort it out on Thursday. There are way too many people in this fight; figuring out what all of them can do and then doing all the rolls is a complete pain in the ass.

Whatever. Don't expect anything soon.
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Is ok. Don't stress.


All is nice and warm. (I am jealous of these animals, fuck these oversized guinea pig's)
 
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[ex-canon] Chapter 162: Best Laid Plans
  • Apocrypha

    • Noburi knew the instant the mist touched him that it wasn'€™t natural. For one thing, it was too dense. For another, it was saturated with chakra. Most importantly, he could feel his own chakra being pulled out of him.

    He spared the briefest moment to pull back some chakra from the mist in order to get a sense of who and what was out there. His eyes went wide and he leapt backward off the wall.

    "Incoming!" he called. "At least ten, all directions! Mist is dangerous!"

    The fort roused itself rapidly as the mist slithered over the walls.

    Hazō was on his feet, rings and claw gauntlets on, almost before the final word left Noburi's mouth. A quick glance around to locate everyone and fix their positions in his mind and then he was moving. "Green Defend! Spearfisher—"

    "Byakugan!" Hyūga shouted, long fingers flicking through the handseal that activated his omnidirectional-vision bloodline. "Four teams—"

    "—implode fog north! Collie—"

    Keiko turned and hurled a tag-equipped kunai up and out into the white wall that was just reaching the team. An instant later there was the familiar tump,bang! of Kagome's second-favorite weapon, the implosion bomb. Inrushing wind tugged at everyone's clothes as the air vanished from a sphere centered on the tag, sucking nearby air in to fill the vacuum. The fog went with it, revealing the inside of the fort for just an instant before the crushing power of the inward wind destroyed the tag, releasing all the previously-vanished air in an outward surge that was only technically not an explosion. Fortunately, Keiko was as skilled with her weapons as ever; she had set the timer on the tag such that the fort was just outside the area of the explosion that would have caused real damage. The mist came hard on the heels of the not-quite-an-explosion, blanketing the area and cutting off vision once again.

    A Hyūga-pale arm thrust out, pointing roughly southwest. "Mist team!" It swung around to almost-true north. "Rock team, three inbound under—"

    "—banshee south, long!—"

    A kunai lanced into the mist, tumbling clumsily. Akane hadn't trained with ranged weapons since the Academy, but that didn't matter in this case. The blade was not the weapon here, the banshee seal attached to it was. All that mattered was getting the horrific thing well away before it triggered, and Akane's pangolin-enhanced muscles were just what the medic-nin ordered for that task. An instant after she threw it the seal activated and screamed in demonic cacophony, the sound made only mildly bearable by the distance it had traveled.

    "—ground!" The pale arm swung farther, now pointing southeast. "Cloud team, thirty meters! Tenten, go!" The tall weapons mistress vanished into the misty night as Hyūga's arm swung south a few degrees. "Mist team, giant crabs inbound! Lee, follow!" He bounded forward, effortlessly clearing the low wall of the fort, and vanished into the mist with his green-clad teammate hot on his heels.

    "Lethal threat! Asuma on Gōketsu One!" Nara called, his voice perfectly pitched to cut through the crosstalk. The latest generation of Ino-Shika-Chō charged towards Hazō, the massive Akimichi Chōji lagging slightly behind his smaller teammates despite much longer legs. His head swiveled back and forth, seeking out anything that might bring harm to his team as the world once again vanished in a sea of white.

    "Ishihara, orders?" Haruno demanded.

    "Quiet!" Akane snapped, still looking at Hazō even as she raised one hand towards her teammate in a forceful 'stop' gesture. The other girl's mouth clopped shut and a startled look spread across her face.

    "—Fish, dome east, tag four! All teams, rally on me!" Hazō bit back the curse as Team Gai vanished into the night, taking with them a massively powerful ranged / close combination and the only person who could see squat in this fog. There was no time to waste and he was too busy grabbing his equipment harness, buckling it on, and digging one half of Air Dome seal #4 out of the right-side pouch. He slapped it down, triggered it, and rolled inwards just in time as Noburi activated his half on the other side of the fort. The familiar dome of chakra surged up and over in a shimmering protective shell....

    ...that was snuffed out of existence as Nara Shikamaru stomped on the seal that Hazō had just laid down, dragging his foot back to scuff and tear the paper into nonfunctionality.

    "What are you doing?!" Hazō demanded, aghast. "We need to—"

    "We need to take out whichever of the Wakahisa is using this chakra drain," Nara said, cutting him off. "Your implosion bomb failed to disperse the mist. I can only assume that trapping ourselves inside a mist-filled dome will not stop the drain. Gōketsu Noburi, which of your former clan is doing this and where are they?"

    Noburi looked puzzled. "I don't know what you're—"

    "Stop," Nara snapped. "We don't have time for games. This is an application of the Wakahisa bloodline. Just as you were able to absorb chakra from us earlier tonight when we put our fingers in your canteen, presumably whichever Wakahisa is out there can drain chakra through the water in this mist. You were on the wall when the implosion bomb momentarily cleared the air, and I saw you looking around. Where are they?"

    "I don't—"

    "Just tell him," Hazō said. "He's right, we don't have time."

    Noburi snarled. "Wakahisa Aiko, one of my distant cousins. That fucking bitch, I cannot believe she would use this. It's a fucking secret—" He cut himself off and took a deep, centering breath. "Right. She's older than I am, and I would imagine she can drain faster that I can. She's been going slow, probably hoping we wouldn't notice right away. It looks like either the banshee or the imploder rattled her a bit, but any second now she's going to crank it all the way up. Nara, I could suck you dry in under a minute, and—"

    "—therefore she is the priority target," Nara said. "Yes. Which way?"

    "Southeast, with the crab maker and whoever the third one is. Also, I can tell that the Lightning team are just to their—"

    "—move!" Nara shouted, going from motionless to full sprint in an instant as the air began to crackle and stink of thunderstorms.

    'A sprinting Nara outranks the Hokage' was a famous axiom in Leaf. (Albeit one stated only in whispers.) All of the Leaf ninja were young, and Team Gōketsu was new to the village, but they all knew the axiom well and they scattered like leaves in a hurricane.

    Use your TacMov to dodge the horrific pillar of demonic energy that is appearing where you were just standing!

    TacMov:
    Hazō, 27d100: C-class success
    Keiko, 27d100: C-class success
    Noburi, 22d100: B-class success
    Akane, 30d100: C-class success
    Nara, ?d100: A-class failure!
    Yamanaka, ?d100: B-class failure!
    Akimichi, ?d100: A-class success
    Yamamoto, ?d100: B-class success
    Haruno, ?d100: C-class success


    Behind them, a pillar of lightning coalesced, arcing and snapping at everything around it. Yamanaka screamed in agony as one of the arcs caught her between the shoulder blades, hurling her forward in a spasming heap. A wisp of demonic energy, stretching farther than its brethren, caressed Nara's leg and made it lock up. The boy threw himself forward into a series of rolls across the surface of the water as he struggled to get farther away. An instant later, Akimichi shot past him and snatched him off the ground with one hand, throwing him over his left shoulder as he went; Yamanaka was draped over his right shoulder, still convulsing. The weight of both his teammates barely slowed the massive boy's surprisingly rapid run across the stagnant surface of the swamp.

    Racing through the dense fog, Hazō instantly lost sight of everyone more than arm's reach from him. All he could do was focus on his footing as he ran towards where he remembered Neji and Noburi saying Wakahisa Aiko was. They needed to take that woman out, fast. Keiko wouldn't dare spend the amount of chakra necessary to summon a pangolin; everyone was already down a bit from the draining that Noburi had done before bedtime plus the small amount that this enemy Wakahisa had done thus far. For a moment he regretted the need for Noburi to drain everyone, but it had seemed sensible at the time; the boy had spent a lot of chakra fueling Hazō's fortress-building efforts and Keiko's multiple summonings. Noburi still wasn't at full strength but, now that the secret of mist drain was out and he was free to use the ability himself, he would be pretty soon.

    A faint breeze carried the scent of thunderstorms to Hazō's nose. Ahead and to his right, somewhere off in the fog, what was almost certainly another of the lightning pillars crackled into existence. A second later, a hopefully-unrelated scream came from behind him and to his left, only to be cut off in the middle.

    Pausing, he crouched down on the surface of the swamp water, unconsciously regulating the chakra flows from his feet to keep himself from sinking in. He focused on calming his own breathing and trying to listen over the thunder of his own fast-racing pulse.

    Before he could sort out the sounds around him, Noburi's voice cut through the fog from somewhere at Hazō's two o'clock. "All Leaf friendlies, gather on me! All Leaf friendlies—yow!" Hazō's brother went silent, cut off in mid-sentence.



    XP will be awarded by @Velorien in the next update

    There were a number of problems with this plan. Among them:
    1. You knew you were being drained, yet you decided to hunker down under an Air Dome for 10-15 seconds (3-5 rounds) despite knowing that it is possible to drain through an Air Dome if the mist was there in the first place. I decided to be a little generous and say that Wakahisa Aiko was draining you slowly in hopes of not being noticed, meaning that you had a few rounds before everyone went toes up.
    2. The purpose of the implosion bomb wasn't stated, but my guess is that it was intended to clear the mist away. Implosion bombs store all the air around them, but then they release it back when the implosion destroys the seal. It does cause a lot of wind, but the wind goes in and then out again and I'm not sure how much that would actually do to disperse the mist. I also wasn't sure what would happen if you tried to store air that was saturated with chakra-infused water. Would it fail completely? Store the air and leave the water behind such that the water precipitated out? Cthulhu? Something else? Furthermore, the same Mist ninja who cast the original HITM could simply do it again. With too many options and my fellow QMs unavailable, I finally decided to keep it simple and have the battlefield briefly revealed, then covered in mist again.
    3. If you were using the implosion bomb to get a clear view, you forgot that you were inside a fortress and there were walls blocking said view. I decided to have Noburi be smart and be up on the wall when the bomb went off so that you could get a little information.
    4. You assumed that everyone would follow your orders. Noburi and Keiko almost certainly would, Akane definitely would, and Akane's team would probably go along with what she did. Neji would absolutely not take orders from you and his team would almost certainly follow his lead in a crisis. There was no reason for the others to follow you either, but I decided to have Shikamaru do the smart thing, recognize what was going on with the mist, and put together the fact that he could get useful information from Noburi before going into the fight. I also had him be smart enough to stop you from turtling up under the Air Dome.
    5. You tried to use Living Roots to gather battlefield information, forgetting that it requires contact with the ground and that the moment you left your fort you were going to be water-walking in the middle of a swamp.
    6. Minor point: You allowed for the possibility of Keiko summoning a pangolin, although you explicitly stated that you couldn't make a valid choice on this one since you didn't know the chakra costs. What you did know, however, was that the costs are high, that Keiko's status as the Pangolin Summoner was public knowledge, that chakra was being actively drained out of everyone, and that Wakahisa can identify the approximate remaining chakra levels of anyone they are draining. Spending huge amounts of chakra while being drained is probably not wise; it would have been smarter to tell her not to summon.


    Here's your current situation:
    • The next update is going to start with an initiative roll. (Assuming it's not an interlude, of course.)
    • At the start of this update almost everyone was below full chakra capacity, as was shown in the prior update. You don't know exact numbers, but here's the outline:
      • Noburi is below full charge because he donated a massive amount of chakra to you and Keiko so that you could build the fort and she could summon pangolins. (I'm honestly not sure if he had enough chakra to power the fort construction and Keiko's summoning, but we'll assume he did just so I don't have to do more friggin' math today.)
      • Tenten, Lee, and Ino/Shika/Cho were down some chakra which they donated to Noburi before bed on the theory that they would regenerate it overnight
      • Keiko was at full because everyone wants her topped up for summoning
      • You were at full because everyone felt it was only fair after you spent so much building the fort
      • Neji was at full because he's a jackass who refused to donate
    • At the end of this update you are down 15 chakra from being drained, and it's safe to assume that everyone else has lost some too.
    • You're water-walking in the middle of the mist. Visibility is a meter or two, no further. Thick mist also muffles sound, so your Awareness is heavily decreased and everyone gets a bonus on Stealth.
    • You can use Living Roots if you're willing to stop water-walking and drop down into a thick layer of mud, through water that is somewhere between ankle- and waist-deep and almost certainly infested with bitey and/or poisonous things. It won't give you any information on anyone who isn't also in contact with the ground. In this case, 'in contact with the ground' means anyone who is walking in the mud or standing on one of the relatively rare patches of dry ground in this area.
    • You can use Hiding Like a Mole and/or MEW if you want. MEW must form from a solid surface, so you can't do it on the water. If you bring it up from the bottom of the swamp it will be permanent.
    • You are separated from everyone else with no clue where they are likely to be by now.
    • Neji pointed out where all the enemy teams were, but you've had to turn a fair bit since then. You're pretty sure that the enemy Wakahisa team that Noburi said included Aiko (the one who is mist-draining you) is at your 12 o'clock, but you aren't at all confident about the others. Of course, any or all of them may have moved around.
    • You have a good vector to where Noburi just shouted from (assuming that was actually him and not an impostor), and it's not far away at your 2:15. On your next action you could easily get there with a Move and still be able to attack. Alternatively, you can continue to where you think the Wakahisa team was, or do whatever else you find appropriate.
    • Somehow, the Lightning team was able to target your fortress well enough to drop an attack right in the middle of where you were all standing, despite being thoroughly wreathed in pea-soup fog. The attack seems to be slow to activate, making it relatively easy to dodge when on open ground, but it still zapped two of you. (Granted, both of them rolled for crap.)
    • The lightning pillar you saw was about 3m high and 1m thick, and Shikamaru was about half a dozen meters away when he got caught by one of the arcs. The pillar seemed to persist, meaning they are an effective form of area denial. The only good news is that the arcing was not in any way targeted, it simply lashed out randomly.
    • There was a team of Rock ninja moving towards your fort underground. Depending on what sensory abilities they have they might or might not be able to track you.
    • Remember those giant crabs that Neji mentioned? Sounds a lot like the Kani clan of Mist, many of whom are known for summoning giant crabs. You've only known one Kani, a fellow student at the Mist Academy of the Ninja Arts, but you never spoke much and you never saw her summon crabs. You have no idea what the parameters of the ability might be—how big, how strong, how many, what powers.


    Voting will now commence, and it will end on Wednesday, September 4, 2017, at 12pm London time.


    PS for the shiny people who help with copyedits: tump,bang! is written as intended.


    EDIT (12/16/2017):

    The mechanics of MfD are completely homebrewed and, frankly, terrible. Trying to create character sheets for two dozen fighters, plus all the necessary jutsu and etc, completely broke the QMs. We are in the process of revamping the rules to run on a modified Dresden Files (derivative of FATE) system. As of today we're getting close to completing that process. Updates have been continuing on the regular schedule but everything after this point is an interlude. Some of it contains plot-relevant information, some of it features Team Uplift, and most of it is actually canon in MfD. We hope you enjoy, and we'll update this note once plot resumes.
     
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  • Apocrypha
    • eaglejarl said:
    1. You knew you were being drained, yet you decided to hunker down under an Air Dome for 10-15 seconds (3-5 rounds) despite knowing that it is possible to drain through an Air Dome if the mist was there in the first place. I decided to be a little generous and say that Wakahisa Aiko was draining you slowly in hopes of not being noticed, meaning that you had a few rounds before everyone went toes up.
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    OliWhail said:
    The fort roused itself rapidly as the mist crested the walls.
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    I'm not sure I agree with this. "Crested" the walls implies to me relatively-slow movement. Certainly enough for us to gather under an air dome.
     
    eaglejarl said:
    Remember those giant crabs that Neji mentioned? Sounds a lot like the Maki clan of Mist, many of whom are known for summoning giant crabs. You've only known one Maki, a fellow student at the Mist Academy of the Ninja Arts, but you never spoke much and you never saw her summon crabs. You have no idea what the parameters of the ability might be—how big, how strong, how many, what powers.
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    I thought the crab clan was the Kani clan?
    OliWhail said:
    "Ooh, ooh, me next!" an older girl with the claw of the Kani clan crest on her lapel butted in.

    "You already show your summons off all the time, Yumiko, let other people have a go," someone called from the back of the crowd. The crowd! Noburi felt his chest swell at the thought.
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    OliWhail said:
    @eaglejarl and @Velorien have earned an additional 2 XP each for allowing me to use the "Nobby-niichan/knobby-knee chan" pun I have been saving forever and letting me name the crab-summoning clan 'Crab'.
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    Well, it's a shitstorm, certainly.

    I knew that gathering under that air dome was a bad idea, though I forgot the details of being drained through mist.

    It wasn't the hivemind's best laid plan so far.
     
    So initial thoughts is that we could throw an explosive upwards to clear the mist and gain vision as we get to Noburi's position. Noburi's not (that) stupid, he wouldn't reveal his position like this if he didn't a) need assistance or b) located his cousin.
     
    Remember when I said that fog of war would lead us to underestimate or overestimate vastly our opponents? I was right. Not only it wasn't only a Mist team, but an international coalition.

    faflec said:
    So initial thoughts is that we could throw an explosive upwards to clear the mist and gain vision as we get to Noburi's position. Noburi's not (that) stupid, he wouldn't reveal his position like this if he didn't a) need assistance or b) located his cousin.
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    Implosive seal seems to do the trick. Throw it up in the air.

    Briefvoice said:
    Or rather it shows just how misleading and dumb the term "hivemind" is. There is no hivemind, just specific individuals posting specific individual plans which other individual people may double check (but usually don't). There is no hivemind and never will be.
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    It's a figurative term. I don't see why people need to get up in a fit about it, and people did double check the plan.
     
    There is going to be a problem down the line if Akane continues to always defer to Hazou over her current team. We should address that once we are in a stable environment to do so, it should be done privately too. Not a full reprimand but we should encourage her to gather opinions from her team as we do not always come up with the best plan, as this situation has demonstrated. Nara was correct to act as he did and we should take his wisdom with good grace and use it as a way to improve ourselves going further.
     
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