The following was originally the final two scenes of Chapter 159, coming immediately after the current ending. It was removed as part of the retcon necessitated by The Great Rules Rewrite after some discussion in QM chat identified simulationist issues. Various patches were proposed and rejected, so we simply eliminated it completely.
Finding a proctor had proven to be relatively easy. Every five or ten minutes a jet of sparks would shoot up into the sky from somewhere in the swamp. Each proctor only signalled once an hour or so, but the bursts went high enough to be visible from several miles away in the more open parts of the swamp and at least a couple hundred yards in the tree-shaded bayou areas along the east side. All that was necessary was to go to where the sparks had come from and then hunt around for the proctor who would be making a (usually) only cursory effort at stealth.
"Well, well, well, if it isn't the Gōketsu sprogs," said the masked ANBU with the green armband. "Never thought I'd see you kids again after you abandoned your home and left most of your teammates to die. How's the new village?"
"We'd like a couple of seals, please," Hazō said, outwardly ignoring the jabs but inwardly seething. He hadn't even wanted to go to the Sage-forsaken proctors! If they had just followed his plan, other people would have been bringing them seals. But noooooo, Keiko and Noburi insisted that the team should explore all elements of the scenario simply for the purpose of intelligence gathering.
"You know the rules. Can't take 'em unless you light 'em up. Here's the first one."
"Hang on, we have to light them one at a time?"
"Duh. If we just handed the whole batch to you at once then you could drop them in the swamp or otherwise destroy them. If I give them to you one by one and try that then I don't give you any more and I tell the other proctors not to either."
"...fine." Hazō took the seal and pulsed a trace of chakra into it to activate it, the way he had with probably tens of thousands of other seals.
Nothing happened.
Frowning, he tried again. Nothing continued to happen.
"This is just a blank," he said, holding it back out to the proctor. "Give me a real seal."
"That is a real seal," the proctor said, his voice smug. "Put a little oomph into it."
Frowning, Hazō pushed a surge of chakra into the seal, which promptly began to emit a tiny flicker of light. He stared at the pulsing wooden disk in horrified disbelief for a moment.
"Son of a motherfucking bitch," he growled. "Who was the fucking moron—"
"Hazō!" Keiko snapped. "Control yourself. What are you talking about?"
"The Sage-cursed seal," Hazō said. "It's a storage unit. A fucking storage unit. A
leaky storage unit. Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of idiots use leaky chakra storage units for their kids' night lights?"
"Hazō," Noburi said patiently, "not all of us are sealing experts. What are you talking about?"
Hazō took a breath. "I'm guessing that these things are not common?"
Noburi shook his head. "No. Seals are expensive and those things are single-use, so only really wealthy clans use them and only occasionally. Usually to impress visitors. What's the problem?"
Hazō took another deep, calming breath. "Noburi, seals are...let's call it a rip in reality. A very carefully-controlled rip that allows a tiny amount of the Out into our world in a controlled way. The Out is...well, I can't really explain it and I sure don't completely understand it, but it's pure Chaos. Infinite possibilities, constantly changing, beyond control in its natural state. That's why seal failures are so unpredictable.
"Actually, a better way to say it is that a seal is a tiny little film that
covers a rip in reality and keeps the Out from coming in until you dissolve the film by activating the seal. I suspect that's what jutsu are as well—a way to let part of the Out into our world in a controlled way, thereby forcing a specific change in local reality.
"That rip is caused when you infuse the seal, and the chakra that you put into the seal keeps it covered, keeps it in a specific pattern and prevents it from spreading or changing shape. Chakra is...it's like light. It doesn't like being contained and it will escape through the tiniest opening. You see the problem?"
"If the shape of the rip is what defines the effect of the seal and the chakra enforces the form of the rip then the chakra leaking out might permit the rip to change shape, thereby changing the function of the seal," Keiko stated. She thought about that for a moment. "That sounds bad."
"You're fucking right it's bad!" Hazō said. "This is fucking insane! The Party Trick seal works like any other seal—the energy of the initial infusion just sets up a pattern that derives its energy from ambient chakra. This thing doesn't. It takes a whomping great amount of chakra and stores it, using that to power itself. But it is explicitly designed to leak! The entire point of the thing is to allow the chakra to leak out. Of course it glows! Chakra almost always produces light as a side effect when it's not efficiently managed, because light is trivially easy to produce, just like heat and uncontrolled bursts of force. That's why when I infuse seals there's usually a slight flicker but when Kagome-sensei does it there usually isn't—he's got enough experience that he can fit the chakra more precisely to the pattern of the seal."
"Can you fix it?" Noburi asked. "If it didn't leak, chakra storage sounds pretty useful."
"Of course it would be useful! Every sealing student thinks of chakra storage on his first day, but nobody does it because it's insane! You've got a big ball of chakra just sitting there, desperately wanting to escape containment. What if your seal wasn't properly designed or you mis-infused it, or containment was breached? It could open a massive rift to the Out!"
"So, what you're saying is that these things are seal failures waiting to happen?" Noburi asked.
"Yes! And there are hundreds, maybe thousands of them wandering around the swamp being lit up by a bunch of kids who don't know a damn thing about sealing!"
"Hazō, I've never heard of such a thing happening," Keiko said carefully. "As we said, the seals are quite rare, but if it was a serious risk then surely it would have happened by now? I find it unlikely that such a thing would have gone unnoticed."
Hazō stopped to think about that. "Well...these things are ridiculously simple and they don't actually store that much chakra so...let's say that the 'rip' would be very small. That's not right, but it gets the idea across. If enough chakra leaks out to make the seal collapse then the rip would almost certainly just close. If it didn't then it would probably just emit a puff of force or light or the smell of purple, but it could tear the rip wide open and create a massive breach to the Out."
"When you say 'massive', what are we talking about?" Noburi asked nervously.
"Remember that rift that the blade monsters came through? That was created by a seal that contained an utterly negligible amount of chakra. This thing has enough in it that you could use it to chakra boost. Amount of chakra doesn't always directly translate to the intensity of the failure, but it certainly doesn't help."
"...oh."
The proctor snorted. "Kid, you're adorable, and it's cute that you read a book on sealing one time, but I think that the grown-up and well-trained sealmasters of Mist know what they're doing. If they think these things are safe then I'm sure they're fine. Now, do you want more seals or not?" He reached into the bag and pulled out another one.
Hazō recoiled as though he'd been offered a scorpion.
"You should really listen to him," Noburi said. "He's trained under Jiraiya of the Three."
The proctor's mask covered his face, but it was easy to imagine the eyeroll. "Yeah, well, that and thirty ryo will get you a bowl of ramen in the market. I'm sure Jiraiya's a badass, but no one has time to become a legendary fighter, personally write fifty-seven pretty crappy books, master scores of different ninjutsu, go to the Pure Land to make a bargain with the Toads, become the greatest sealmaster and spy in the world, and bed every woman in the nations of Fire, Earth, and Wind, all while being the secret ruler of Leaf for thirty years."
"Fifty-eight books," Noburi said. "He published a new one shortly before we came to Mist. Also, the Toad Clan resides on the Seventh Path, not in the Pure Land, and I'm sure that it wasn't
every woman."
"Also, although he was a close friend and advisor to the Third Hokage, I feel confident that the Third was just as in charge as he appeared," Keiko added.
The proctor sighed in irritation. "That's it, I'm done with you brats. Go bother someone else." He turned and leaped into the trees, vanishing from sight in an instant.
"...well, that went well," Noburi said with a sigh. "Come on, let's go back to the fort."
o-o-o-o
Hazō stood up with a sigh, absently brushing the dust off the seat of his pants, and moved back to join the others.
"Figured it out," he said dejectedly.
"That was quick," Noburi said, slurping up some of the noodles from the steaming hot bowl of ramen he'd pulled out of one of his storage scrolls.
"Yeah, seriously," Haruno said. "You weren't even over there for an hour." She, Akane, and Yamamoto had showed up an hour after the team had finished the fortress, tracking in on the explosives being periodically thrown in the air. They'd been sitting quietly by the fire since then.
"Yeah, well, it's incredibly simple," Hazō said, dropping onto the seat next to Akane. "There's no absorption chain to draw power, no control nexi to organize chakra flow, nothing. It's just an envelope with a tiny slit in it." He shook his head. "This thing has to have been designed by some retarded student who taught himself from books and never had a proper master to check his work. He's probably been keeping it secret so that he can sell it—in fact, I bet that's why it's got the wooden casing around it, so that you can't see the seal itself. Probably no one really thought much about it so it's never been investigated by anyone who isn't the completely moronic creator."
"How bad is it?" Akane asked.
Hazō sighed. "It could be worse, I guess. It's so simple that there's not a lot to fail. The, uh, 'rip' at the center of it is small enough that it will seal over on its own in about twenty-four hours, which will cause the envelope to collapse safely. The envelope is...call it 'thick enough' that it's not likely to tear on its own in that amount of time, as long as the thing was properly scribed and infused in the first place. If it did tear then it would probably, um"—he made vague gestures with his hands, struggling to get across concepts that didn't fit well into any human language—"direct the chakra outwards? I guess? If it did then there wouldn't be an issue. If it went inwards, towards the rip at the center, then things could go really bad."
"I see," said Yamamoto. "How many of these seals do you estimate will be in play?"
"Worst case, four thousand, give or take," Keiko said. "That's assuming that all proctors are carrying roughly the same number and that none of them go to restock."
"How could you possibly know that?" Haruno asked.
"Here we go," Noburi muttered.
"The proctor's bag was approximately sixteen inches across, twenty inches high, and four inches deep at the bottom," Keiko said. "That makes twelve hundred and eighty cubic inches at maximum expansion. Each of these seals is inside a casing that is an oblate disk two inches across and an inch high at the center. If we approximate that as a cylinder we can estimate it as three cubic inches, meaning that the sack could hold at most four or five hundred seals. I would estimate that it was only about a third full, for a total of roughly one hundred and fifty seals. I have personally counted fifty different proctors thus far and there are more that I have not managed to distinguish. Most of them, however, will need to remain around the perimeter of the swamp to catch anyone attempting to leave. The swamp is roughly a hundred square miles, and you don't want the proctors too near one another, so it would make sense to have about twenty or twenty-five giving out seals. Twenty-five proctors times one hundred and fifty seals each is three thousand, seven hundred and fifty seals, but I will round that up to four thousand for pessimism. There are most likely two other shifts of proctors, but they would presumably use the same bags as their earlier-shift counterparts instead of bringing their own.
"Also, four thousand seals represents the output of a single sealmaster working ten hour days, six days per week, for five and a half weeks. Mist has recently been through a succession crisis, so it's likely that the decision to have the Exams and the exact nature of the events was decided sometime in the last two months. Hazō stated there is likely only one sealmaster who knows how to make this seal. Therefore, five and a half weeks of production seems like a reasonable number." She shrugged. "Of course, I've rounded most of these numbers up in order to be pessimistic. The actual total might be as low as three thousand."
Haruno turned to Yamamoto. "Oh my god, it's like a girl version of Nara," she said.
Yamamoto grunted sourly, carefully turning the sausage he was cooking over the fire.
Haruno frowned and turned back to Keiko. "That all seems reasonable, but how could you distinguish between the proctors? They all wear the same uniform and their faces are completely covered. I identified twelve by their gaits but couldn't keep track of the rest and they kept moving around."
"Count the haircuts, Sakura," Yamamoto said, turning the sausage again.
"Hazō, what happens if one of those seals gets destroyed?" Noburi asked. "Like, say, dropped in water or hit with a fireball."
"That could be bad," Hazō said. "It would definitely cause the chakra envelope to fail, and it would do it in an uncontrolled way. I have no idea what would happen, or if it would be more or less likely to go wrong. I haven't spent as much time on seal failures as Kagome-sensei has; I've mostly been focused on construction and methods of operation. Understanding failure modes involves a lot of theory that I haven't learned yet."
"Normal seals don't summon horrible blade monsters if they get damaged," Noburi said. "If one of these seals hadn't been activated yet would it still be a danger?"
Hazō shook his head. "I wouldn't think so."
"Okay, so if we destroy the seals before they're active then that's fine but once they're glowing we don't dare do anything to them? Which probably includes putting them in some isolated part of the swamp far, far away from us since then we wouldn't know if there was a problem until it was too late."
"Right."
"Okay. Suppose we get as many of these things as we can and we take them to the edge of the swamp, give them to the proctors? We wouldn't get points for them but it would get them into a safer environment where they're less likely to get damaged until they expire."
"That...could work," Hazō said slowly. "We might even be able to pass a message to Jiraiya while we're at it. He needs to see these things."
Noburi shook his head. "Not happening. They aren't going to let us send messages or do anything that looks like us trying to get outside help. Keiko, I'm guessing that Panashe wouldn't be able to sneak in and see Jiraiya?"
Keiko shook her head. "No. There is no way that a pangolin could locate a single human that she's never smelled before in a city this size, even if Jiraiya is in one of the locations we would anticipate. Furthermore, he is undoubtedly spending all his time in meetings with either the Mizukage or other important figures. Those people will have offices on upper floors in order to render tunneling jutsu ineffective, and security will be very tight."
"Okay..." Hazō said. "Okay, here's what I think we should do...."
What does Hazō think the teams should do? You can:
- Follow Noburi's plan to acquire as many seals as possible and get them out of the swamp where they will be safe(r);
- Continue with your 'wait for people to come to us, then trade with them' plan, relying on the fact that the chance of any of the seals failing is very low and that once they are inside the protective walls of your fort they are much less likely to be damaged;
- Go out and adopt the famous 'want to buy a brick?' trading strategy. ("Want to buy a brick for $20? No? <hits you with the brick and takes your $20>"); or,
- Come up with something else.
Hazō spent just over 45 minutes investigating the Night Light seal and is now able to create and infuse them should he ever be stupid enough to want to. He has no interest in doing so, nor in studying the concept of chakra storage in general as that might well fall under the rubric of 'weaponizing seal failure' which Jiraiya has warned him to avoid.
The seals will take between 5 and 10 chakra to activate (it varies semi-randomly for no reason that Hazō was able to determine). They do not provide any significant degree of illumination; you can see them from a moderate distance in darkness, but they are not sufficient to easily read by.
Various facts:
- It is starting to get dark now so moving around in the swamp will be very difficult for the next 10-12 hours unless you want to bring easily-visible lights.
- Given the difficulty of moving around in the densely-packed group, you did not have the opportunity to talk with anyone aside from Team Asuma and Team Kurenai. They haven't shown up yet.
- Building the fortress around a proctor is not feasible. They are moving around in the swamp. You built the thing, Paneru certified it. You have 20 LBFs hooked to about 40 explosive tags rigged up as claymores and various mechanical traps.
- Hazō produced 40 Party Trick seals while the fort was being constructed around him but since then has been focused on other things. Those 40 seals are in the Summon Realm, taken back by Paneru when she left. Panache (the Nonstandard Operations pangolin) is still with you but is generally staying out of the discussion.
Voting ends on Wednesday, September 20, 2017, at 12pm London time.
