- Location
- Potato land
But then, how do you stop everyone from having it, eventually? If all you need for a transfinite energy bomb is three modified storage seals and some twine, then any idiot can make one once it leaks, as it inevitably will.
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- Tags
- naruto rationalist romance armageddon is looking better and better damn you kishimoto explosions everywhere explosives solve everyone if in doubt surrender to the mercy of zabuza it seemed like a good idea at the time looks like a really bad case of being a jōnin my god. where does the lore end? precommitting is the winning plan screaming in kagome screw the rules i have explosives something bad might still happen sometimes you gotta sociopath stabby zabby subsection c of paragraph 9 should include we can weaponize this so hard
But then, how do you stop everyone from having it, eventually? If all you need for a transfinite energy bomb is three modified storage seals and some twine, then any idiot can make one once it leaks, as it inevitably will.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
The transfinite bomb we're referring to isn't explosion nukes; it's keying a 5SB to a rotating pulsar star instead of the earth.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
While I won't rule out that possibility, the only info we have on the matter is Jiraiya saying that Air Dome and related seals stubbornly fixing themselves relative to the Earth were a real pain for him, suggesting that even a sealmaster of his caliber can't change that quality.
Now granted, keying to a different reference frame is different from unkeying entirely, but I would expect it to be extremely difficult nonetheless, especially if we don't have up-close access to said pulsar.
Vecht
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- Snarksville, Snarkland
Doesn't even have to be a pulsar; you could get the effect just by keying it to "first object encountered in -that- direction" and pointing at the sky.
BTW did I mention that we should not try this? Because we definitely should not try this.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
It might be easier to make it key to the sealmaster's reference frame than anything else.
Chakra Dissipation Problem. None of this would work until we solve that.
Honestly, the Watchers seem like not the greatest idea from a world-building perspective. They lie at the end of a chain of if-thens that the GMs mostly created for themselves. I believe it went something like:
1. Sealing in Naruto canon can accomplish a great variety of seemingly unrelated things. It seems very powerful! Why isn't it far more of a focus for ninja?
2. Sealing must be really dangerous then. Doing it wrong leads to unpredictable, but often fatal, consequences that can't be completely prepared for due to their unpredictable nature. That's why more ninja don't do it.
3. Oh shit, now the players are asking why they can't deliberately weaponize sealing failures!? It's because, uh, there's a group called the Watchers that is somehow omniscient and powerful enough to successfully enforce a prohibition against doing that.
But come on, there has to be some way to get to "sealing is powerful but rare" without going to a conspiracy.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I'd like to point out that we didn't know the watchers even existed until Jiraiya told us about them, and Kagome doesn't believe in them. I don't think it's unreasonable for them to be fake.
It'd be very easy, after all, for a concerned Professor to pull a little genjutsu on his student and convince him not to fuck around with sealing failures.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I mean, strictly speaking the only evidence we have of the Watchers is Jiraiya's encounter with them... which sounds quite a lot like sleep paralysis, leading to the possibility that Jiraiya suffered sleep paralysis after a desperate, ridiculously risky sealing-based maneuver and filled in the dots in entirely the wrong way.
Think of it like this: you're Jiraiya, extremely hardened ninja safe behind layers of traps. You are forced awake by an intense feeling of doom and a weight on your chest, like there's someone pressing you down into your bed. Your mind instinctively goes back to the sealing failure you set off earlier and the rumours you heard about giant sealing conspiracies. You're not sure what's going on except you feel so much dread and you're panicking and there's someone there and you can't do anything about it. And then whoever it was is gone as quickly as they came, and you calm down a little, and find that they didn't leave a trace behind.
To someone who doesn't know that sleep paralysis is a thing, the only reasonable explanation for what happened is that a super-elite ninja broke into your camp, got past all your traps, personally confronted you while you were at your most vulnerable, and then reset all your traps as they left just to show off how good they are. And you think it must not be a coincidence that this happens after the one battle you intentionally made a sealing failure. All you can really say is that you're glad whoever it was decided to spare you.
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Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Theres a bit of wiggle room for the Watchers to be simultaneously terrifying and an S class threat and them not being abritrarily powerful and all seeing. Just a bit.
Honestly, short of some sort of Unbreakable Vow type device ensuring mutual cooperation and neutrality on their part, I have to wonder why they havent just taken over the world already, if they do exist as an entity.
Im sort of hedging on "The Watchers really exist." simply because the alternative is that someone would have tried to weaponize sealing failures on a large scale before.
Its also possible that the Watchers are just a subroutine of the Chakra AI or something. Or they have some sort of ridiculous OP loot the Sage left behind, except it cant really be games to take over the world.
Who knows. If in the endgame they get in the way of uplift, well we'll just have to figure out how to smash them into paste too.
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That certainly seems more likely than some secret organization of super-powerful beings enforcing rules about Sealing.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
I think there's another explanation, along with InfernoVulpix's already good explanation for the one encounter; simply put, Sealing as a discipline has a very strong selective factor against sealing failures, since natural selection tends to eliminate those that cause sealing failures.
I think there's also a possibility that if your Sealing straight up isn't high enough you can't even get the more esoteric destructive ways to kill yourself and everyone you know, which would prevent first time disciples from being roaming nukes that the Watchers as an organization would necessitate preventing.
Therefore, any group that wanted to weaponize sealing failures would themselves have to have a very high sealing level, something to make them desperate enough to disregard the threat of sealing failures, and furthermore be willing to sacrifice every high level sealer they have. Very few entities jump to the top of the list there.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
To be quite honest, I expect that one of the few "rules" of sealing is that sealing failures tend to "target" -- however vaguely -- the sealmaster that infuses them, which explains why the people who experimented with weaponizing storage scroll seal failures died in spite of, presumably, utilizing some degree of safety precautions.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Eh, it's better to assume they do exist anyways, because all they really stop us from doing is making seal WMDs and intentionally failing seal infusions, and it's instant game over if they actually exist and we provoke them. One day we may want to pursue that thread more and maybe test the waters if we're strong enough, but until then it's easier to keep our nukes to ourselves (not like the EN needs more MAD anyways)
Dissonance
Luna's Luna
- Location
- Ginnungagap.
- Pronouns
- S/H/T
That's the one where Skywalkers don't work five feet off the ground because of trying to push so much energy though space, righ-
inb4 retcon?
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
No, it's the one where chakra only goes so far from its source before it dissipates into the environment.
e:
...Does sage chakra dissipate into the environment?
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- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
So I figured I'd look at Jiraiya's story directly, in case I was missing something.
Anyways, I then decided to look for anything else the QMs had said about the watchers:
Finally, we have two cases where 'watchers' are referred to but not explicitly The Watchers:
I'm not 100% sure what Jiraiya meant by disabling and fixing the traps. It sounds to me like they were left in the same state they were in when Jiraiya fell asleep, which meshes with sleep paralysis, but Jiraiya seemed to take that as evidence that it wasn't a dream so I'm not sure.
Anyways, I then decided to look for anything else the QMs had said about the watchers:
A couple jokes and a couple serious posts, but nothing that really lets slip whether they're real or not.
Finally, we have two cases where 'watchers' are referred to but not explicitly The Watchers:
Clearly, we should assume that The Watchers are heavily implicated with Hidden Mountain politics and that Zabuza is not only aware of them but has reason to be concerned even when he's in Snow and not doing any sealing at all.
Jello_Raptor
(Confirmed Jelly)
- Location
- Left of Center
Huh, I have the exact same issue.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Have you checked to make sure you're not the same person?
I mean, I've never seen you two in the same room.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
How do I know you aren't all me? Or that I aren't all you?
Or that we aren't us, but they are us and we aren't them?
But how do they know we aren't them and they are us but they and we haven't all been in the same room as all of me but you have?
You don't, do you?
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Dissonance
Luna's Luna
- Location
- Ginnungagap.
- Pronouns
- S/H/T
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Every account on SV is a bot except you.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
I don't know about you, but I'm a bot.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Total population of the EN: about
Not certain about this, but I think that's in the right ballpark.
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Vecht
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- Snarksville, Snarkland
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Interesting.