- Location
- Why would this be required?
Any update that involves annoying the hell out of the judge is a win for me, good show
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 open voting
Any update that involves annoying the hell out of the judge is a win for me, good show
- Location
- Yes.
Clearly he's using Asuma's trench knives. They cut through rocks and explosives.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You saw nothing.
- Location
- Why would this be required?
You can edit the post but you can't edit the truth!
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Noooooo!!
Let's not become loan sharks.
But we can go the other way. Gratitude.
- Location
- Yes.
I know it was technically an interlude and had dubious canonicity...but one of Sasuke's background Aspects described a mission where Team Nakamura went above and beyond by rescuing some bigwig's kid and said bigwig became a useful contact for the team. It might not necessarily be the fastest way of getting contacts, but it would be one where we'd get contacts AND get paid for it AND have an excuse to be in the area to do side recruiting...
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Or are we???
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Or will we have ever left it?
Vecht
Self-Requested Ban
- Location
- Snarksville, Snarkland
Counterfactually, we never will have ever not been leaving tomorrow yesterday.
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- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You'd be surprised.
- Location
- Kiev, Ukraine
Well, thank you! I do think having an informational gathering unit could become a spy network, but its definitely a long-term that shouldn't be the main focus for now. Moreover, some "secret spy" information will be coming to us on its own when we have an information network.
There is also a thought I haven't got time to consider in details, so I'll just throw it here:
We can try to make our collected data publicly accessible (not for free, of course, but still). This will result in several things:
- civilian merchants from all countries will love us - any trader can just buy a list of pricess from us to minimize his economical risks.
- moreover, they can ask for some information that we don't have yet (e.g. "how high s the demand for telescopes in Rice?"), which will allow us to pass it as a ninja mission (C rank, mostly) and go in other country with a legal and plausible aim. Travelling will allow us to gather actually secret information and further our other conspiracies.
- other ninja villages will surely start of by being conspicious about us and our project, but in time we will be dismissed by most of them as harmless, because "bah, they're just doing this lousy civilian stuff". Selling our info will help here as well.
- in few years we will become an organization that
- provides public services on international scale;
- have reasons to visit almost any country on a whimp;
- is backed up by Merchant Council;
- takes its nieche right between merchants, ninjas and yaks. where every one of them is somewhat interested, somewhat annoyed by us, but none has enough incentive and/or balls to get rid of us.
When we agree on design and goals, at least to some extent, we can start writting an actual plan. We should hurry, though, becase I believe paper production may ba among fist steps here, so we'll probably need that trip to Mountain. And we will need it before QMs drop something sinister on our heads.
That's sinister in "will take another year of real time to get through" I'm more concerned than "dangerous for Gouketsu lives" sinister
Chapter 250: Shaken, but Stirred
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Keiko!"
Hazō gave chase at a brisk walk, aware that if he spooked her, she might run like a startled cat. Was it his imagination, or was her pace just that tiny bit slower than usual? Did she want him to catch up?
It probably was just his imagination. Her message had referred to her "clan responsibilities", as if to imply that she wasn't going to stick around once those were fulfilled.
What were his options? He couldn't physically stop her going back to the Seventh Path. Well, maybe he could, but it would kill any prospect of reconciliation stone dead. But people in fiction never responded to shouts of "Wait!" It was almost as bad as "This isn't what it looks like!" and only a moderate improvement over "Just calm down!"
"Keiko, I've got something to say to you!"
Noburi Saves the Day Again, coming soon to a theatre near you.
Keiko half-turned.
"Yes?"
"Will you hear me out, preferably in a place that doesn't have the entire population of the continent listening in?"
"As you may be aware from the match, my patience is presently hovering around zero. On the other hand, the same applies to enduring whatever celebrations the Pangolin Clan may see fit to inflict on me upon my return. You may follow me to neutral ground."
Neutral ground turned out to be the café where Hazō had found a bemused Shikamaru earlier. To the boy's great fortune, he hadn't come back.
Keiko made a beeline for the nearest waiter, who paled a little as he recognised her.
"W-Welcome, honourable ninja. How may we serve you today?"
"We require the use of your private room," Keiko said.
"Many apologies, but that room is presently occupied by a pair of—"
"They will leave," Keiko said simply.
Hazō flinched.
"Keiko," he began.
She raised her hand, silencing him.
"Very well," she said. "Their meal will be charged to the Nara Clan, as will replacing the table. If Shikamaru has any objections, you may direct him to face Gōketsu Keiko, in those words."
"Now," Keiko said once they were seated, "be brief. Doubtless Jiraiya will arrive shortly, and I have no desire to interact with him."
"Keiko," Noburi began, "I'm sorry. I don't mean specifically for hurting your feelings—around here, we leave that to the experts—but I should have paid more attention to how you were feeling these last few months. It's not like I hadn't noticed that you've had a lot on your mind. Maybe if I'd done more to support you, we wouldn't be sitting here now, trying to bridge a gap that should never have been there in the first place.
"I know it doesn't change what's already happened," Noburi said, "but I understand exactly how I messed up, and I'm going to learn from my mistake. I'm sorry."
"Your apology is unwarranted," Keiko said tensely. "I appreciate that I am exceedingly difficult to deal with, and do not contribute sufficient value to call for the expenditure of the time and energy necessary to address my psychological issues. I do not condemn you for having taken a neutral stance on the issue."
It was exactly what Hazō had expected. Exactly what frustrated him time and again. Exactly what could be a genuine threat to their relationship at a moment when it was so fragile. He still felt bad for how he'd handled the Mori situation, but sometimes the apologetic approach could only take you so far.
"Keiko, there is not one thing you just said that makes sense!"
"On the contrary, I can provide extensive—"
"Hold it," Hazō said. "You can get back to telling us how much you suck when I'm done."
He took a deep breath.
"Did you or did you not just walk out of that arena as the Chūnin Exam champion? Do you realise that by definition that makes you the greatest genin in the world?"
Keiko opened her mouth.
"I'm not done," Hazō snapped. "Have we, or have we not, repeatedly bet our lives on your planning skills, and always come out alive and sometimes unharmed? Are you, or are you not, a key part of the lives of many people, all of whom clearly have better judgement than you?
"Which part of that lets you say that we're not allowed to take care of you?"
Silence. Keiko thinking. Had he got through to her?
"You are missing the point," Keiko said. Hazō decided that just because the table was going to be replaced anyway didn't mean he should beat his head against it.
"You declare me to have objective value because you lack a clear point of reference. There is nothing about me that makes me particularly suited to being the Pangolin Summoner, and in fact I possess a number of features that render me less fit for the purpose. Countless shinobi would have fared better with the same resources. In regard to planning, I have stated before that I am average at best by Mori standards, and it is merely ill fortune that you were burdened with such, as opposed to a superior logistician, and an emotionally unstable one at that. Ultimately, I am interchangeable, indeed best interchanged in order to serve the needs of the clan—"
Something in Hazō snapped.
"Fuck the clan!"
Keiko and Noburi reeled back.
"I-I beg your pardon?"
"The clan means nothing," Hazo snarled. "Jiraiya invented it because it was useful. We signed up because it was useful. You do not get to decide your value based on a new surname, a nice house and a bottomless pit of responsibilities none of us asked for."
"Hazō…" Noburi began.
"Still talking. We accepted the label, and we accepted the baggage that came with it, because it was the best way for everyone to get what they wanted. We got rid of Akane, and are in the middle of getting rid of Keiko, because that's what we thought was best for this clan that we'd all created. And by 'we', I half-mean Jiraiya, because we let him make the most important choices for us.
"I'm not saying we dismantle the clan. We can't and we shouldn't. But you and you and me, Kagome-sensei and Mari-sensei and Akane, are not the Gōketsu. We are Team Uplift, and always were."
He could see Noburi and Keiko frowning, not sure where this was going or why. Hazō's own momentum was starting to stall, but then inspiration flared like a bonfire being struck by a fireball.
"We don't know what it's like to have normal families. Keiko, you and I had our lives revolve around a single person, and we lost them two years ago, and even if we can get them back, the kind of relationship we had back then is gone forever. Kagome-sensei was alone for too long, and on some level he's still getting his head around what it means to have friends. Mari-sensei's family destroyed her. Noburi, you're an exception except when you aren't, and I guess Akane's normal because of course she is. And Jiraiya's an orphan with a weird, tangled family that keeps leaving him behind. Maybe one day I'll even consider him one of us, as soon as he stops using fear to keep us in line.
"We don't know what it's like to have normal families, but I've made a decision. I've had enough of acting like having 'Gōketsu' in front of our names tells us who we are to each other. I've had enough of "stepsister", and "adopted sister", and "sibling", and "clansib", whatever that means. I can't even keep them straight in my head. Noburi, you're my brother. Keiko, you're my sister. Kagome-sensei is my crazy uncle, if he wants to be. Mari-sensei isn't quite a big sister, and isn't quite a mother, and maybe we'll come up with a new word for what she is, but she's as much one of us as the rest. Maybe it's time we asked her about dropping the 'sensei'. And Akane being my sister would have been weird before, but I guess that problem has solved itself.
"Keiko, we are your family now. The word 'value' doesn't mean anything to family."
"Hazō, I do not know if I am ready to have a family," Keiko said with an edge of panic.
"Look at it this way," Noburi chipped in, "nobody is born knowing what to do. Especially into a family as weird as this one. We're all going to be making it up as we go along, even me."
"But I have already failed my birth family!" Keiko pleaded. "Profoundly and repeatedly. I even brought suffering to Ami!"
"Keiko," Hazō said bluntly, "we don't care. We are not interested in whether you can justify yourself. We are not interested in whether you think you're good or bad. We are not interested in whether we could have got a better deal, or whether you're high- or low-maintenance, and above all, we don't care if you succeed or fail. We've decided that we're your family, and there's nothing you can do about it."
-o-
Hazō thought back to the Kurosawa, who'd discarded their own heir for the sake of the clan's reputation. Had there been some kind of ruthless calculation behind their unforgivable betrayal, rather than common-or-garden prejudice as he'd always assumed?
"So we've covered the ends," Hazō said. "Can we get back to the means? I don't like the fact that she batted me around like a cat toy instead of treating me as an equal. If she can't be honest with me, how am I supposed to trust her with anything important?"
"Hazō," Keiko said carefully, "that was her treating you as an equal. She was offering you the opportunity to play the game at her level. As she found you increasingly incapable of doing so, she shifted to a didactic approach intended to raise your level, with an ambiguous ratio of instruction to personal amusement."
"Come to think of it, she did imply that a lot," Hazō said. "But why would she care about making me a better player? To make me a better husband? A better ally? Then why would she start during our first meeting?"
"Why indeed?" Jiraiya said. "Have I mentioned my barely-controllable impulse to choke that girl to death?
"The obvious guess is that it's a show of dominance: 'I'm not only a better player than you, I'm so much better I can teach you.' Or worse, 'I'm so much better than you that I can give away my techniques and still expect to win.' But showing off that kind of dominance over Hazō is overkill. It's like using the Rasengan to swat a fly."
"I appreciate and respect you too, sir."
"Ooh, I know this one," Noburi raised his hand. "It's a favour thing. Hazō can't refuse to passively learn from her, and when he does, that puts him in her debt. She can go, 'Oh, hey, remember how I taught you how to greeble the quong?' and he can't exactly say, "But I never wanted to know how to greeble the quong, even though I'm totally going to go on to greeble quongs all over the place because it's a really valuable skill."
"Greeble the quong?" Hazō asked sceptically.
"Sure. It's like greebling the zuzubel, but you divide instead of multiplying. I bribed Honoka to teach me so I could shock Kagome next time I was feeling bored."
"Moving on," Hazō said pointedly, "we need to talk about Keiko."
Keiko, lost in thought, abruptly jerked in her seat. "What about me? Do not ask me questions! I told you, I need time to process!"
"Keiko, I was going to talk to you about your sister," Hazō said. He really didn't want to get into the family thing in front of Jiraiya, whom he was deliberately excluding. You had to be able to trust family not to murder you for the greater good as defined by them personally.
"If you're OK with it, and only if you're OK with it, I'd like to try and get a straight answer out of her about why she's treating you the way she is. I don't know what her intentions are, but the fact is, she's hurting you. She needs to understand that, and she needs to be up front about why. I don't think I can work with her if she's going to keep treating you this way."
Keiko shook her head.
"You are free to ask whatever questions you want. We have established that I have no right to interfere."
"This isn't about rights," Hazō said. "I'm asking you what you want."
Keiko didn't answer for a while. Jiraiya's fingers drummed on the table with growing impatience.
"I want to know," she said softly. "Was my failure to rejoin the clan truly such a profound betrayal as to cost me my sister's love in a heartbeat? Had I failed her already at some earlier stage? Perhaps some transformation in her life of the past two years had rendered me unnecessary? I have asked myself these questions and more, every night and every day. I fear to hear the answer, and yet…"
"Understood," Hazō said. "One direct confession, coming up."
"Why should she tell you when she chose not to tell me?" Keiko asked.
"Because she needs me."
Hazō winced on the inside at the implication that, by contrast, Mori didn't need Keiko. Keiko either didn't register it or, more likely, took it for granted.
"The way she's treating you is unacceptable, and we have the leverage to make it stop."
Keiko looked down at her feet. "Not unacceptable," she muttered.
"What?"
"Not unacceptable. Ami is everything to me, even still. She raised me. She saved me from the world. She sacrificed hours and days that could have hastened her meteoric rise to help a little girl who had earned nothing and deserved nothing. If Ami wishes to hurt me, then she may hurt me."
Hazō, Noburi and Jiraiya exchanged glances.
"Kid," Jiraiya said, "I was there with Orochimaru during his last days in Leaf, and that is still one of the most fucked-up things I've ever heard.
"Hazō, do the thing. You have carte blanche."
Hazō gave chase at a brisk walk, aware that if he spooked her, she might run like a startled cat. Was it his imagination, or was her pace just that tiny bit slower than usual? Did she want him to catch up?
It probably was just his imagination. Her message had referred to her "clan responsibilities", as if to imply that she wasn't going to stick around once those were fulfilled.
What were his options? He couldn't physically stop her going back to the Seventh Path. Well, maybe he could, but it would kill any prospect of reconciliation stone dead. But people in fiction never responded to shouts of "Wait!" It was almost as bad as "This isn't what it looks like!" and only a moderate improvement over "Just calm down!"
"Keiko, I've got something to say to you!"
Noburi Saves the Day Again, coming soon to a theatre near you.
Keiko half-turned.
"Yes?"
"Will you hear me out, preferably in a place that doesn't have the entire population of the continent listening in?"
"As you may be aware from the match, my patience is presently hovering around zero. On the other hand, the same applies to enduring whatever celebrations the Pangolin Clan may see fit to inflict on me upon my return. You may follow me to neutral ground."
-o-
Neutral ground turned out to be the café where Hazō had found a bemused Shikamaru earlier. To the boy's great fortune, he hadn't come back.
Keiko made a beeline for the nearest waiter, who paled a little as he recognised her.
"W-Welcome, honourable ninja. How may we serve you today?"
"We require the use of your private room," Keiko said.
"Many apologies, but that room is presently occupied by a pair of—"
"They will leave," Keiko said simply.
Hazō flinched.
"Keiko," he began.
She raised her hand, silencing him.
"Very well," she said. "Their meal will be charged to the Nara Clan, as will replacing the table. If Shikamaru has any objections, you may direct him to face Gōketsu Keiko, in those words."
"Now," Keiko said once they were seated, "be brief. Doubtless Jiraiya will arrive shortly, and I have no desire to interact with him."
"Keiko," Noburi began, "I'm sorry. I don't mean specifically for hurting your feelings—around here, we leave that to the experts—but I should have paid more attention to how you were feeling these last few months. It's not like I hadn't noticed that you've had a lot on your mind. Maybe if I'd done more to support you, we wouldn't be sitting here now, trying to bridge a gap that should never have been there in the first place.
"I know it doesn't change what's already happened," Noburi said, "but I understand exactly how I messed up, and I'm going to learn from my mistake. I'm sorry."
"Your apology is unwarranted," Keiko said tensely. "I appreciate that I am exceedingly difficult to deal with, and do not contribute sufficient value to call for the expenditure of the time and energy necessary to address my psychological issues. I do not condemn you for having taken a neutral stance on the issue."
It was exactly what Hazō had expected. Exactly what frustrated him time and again. Exactly what could be a genuine threat to their relationship at a moment when it was so fragile. He still felt bad for how he'd handled the Mori situation, but sometimes the apologetic approach could only take you so far.
"Keiko, there is not one thing you just said that makes sense!"
"On the contrary, I can provide extensive—"
"Hold it," Hazō said. "You can get back to telling us how much you suck when I'm done."
He took a deep breath.
"Did you or did you not just walk out of that arena as the Chūnin Exam champion? Do you realise that by definition that makes you the greatest genin in the world?"
Keiko opened her mouth.
"I'm not done," Hazō snapped. "Have we, or have we not, repeatedly bet our lives on your planning skills, and always come out alive and sometimes unharmed? Are you, or are you not, a key part of the lives of many people, all of whom clearly have better judgement than you?
"Which part of that lets you say that we're not allowed to take care of you?"
Silence. Keiko thinking. Had he got through to her?
"You are missing the point," Keiko said. Hazō decided that just because the table was going to be replaced anyway didn't mean he should beat his head against it.
"You declare me to have objective value because you lack a clear point of reference. There is nothing about me that makes me particularly suited to being the Pangolin Summoner, and in fact I possess a number of features that render me less fit for the purpose. Countless shinobi would have fared better with the same resources. In regard to planning, I have stated before that I am average at best by Mori standards, and it is merely ill fortune that you were burdened with such, as opposed to a superior logistician, and an emotionally unstable one at that. Ultimately, I am interchangeable, indeed best interchanged in order to serve the needs of the clan—"
Something in Hazō snapped.
"Fuck the clan!"
Keiko and Noburi reeled back.
"I-I beg your pardon?"
"The clan means nothing," Hazo snarled. "Jiraiya invented it because it was useful. We signed up because it was useful. You do not get to decide your value based on a new surname, a nice house and a bottomless pit of responsibilities none of us asked for."
"Hazō…" Noburi began.
"Still talking. We accepted the label, and we accepted the baggage that came with it, because it was the best way for everyone to get what they wanted. We got rid of Akane, and are in the middle of getting rid of Keiko, because that's what we thought was best for this clan that we'd all created. And by 'we', I half-mean Jiraiya, because we let him make the most important choices for us.
"I'm not saying we dismantle the clan. We can't and we shouldn't. But you and you and me, Kagome-sensei and Mari-sensei and Akane, are not the Gōketsu. We are Team Uplift, and always were."
He could see Noburi and Keiko frowning, not sure where this was going or why. Hazō's own momentum was starting to stall, but then inspiration flared like a bonfire being struck by a fireball.
"We don't know what it's like to have normal families. Keiko, you and I had our lives revolve around a single person, and we lost them two years ago, and even if we can get them back, the kind of relationship we had back then is gone forever. Kagome-sensei was alone for too long, and on some level he's still getting his head around what it means to have friends. Mari-sensei's family destroyed her. Noburi, you're an exception except when you aren't, and I guess Akane's normal because of course she is. And Jiraiya's an orphan with a weird, tangled family that keeps leaving him behind. Maybe one day I'll even consider him one of us, as soon as he stops using fear to keep us in line.
"We don't know what it's like to have normal families, but I've made a decision. I've had enough of acting like having 'Gōketsu' in front of our names tells us who we are to each other. I've had enough of "stepsister", and "adopted sister", and "sibling", and "clansib", whatever that means. I can't even keep them straight in my head. Noburi, you're my brother. Keiko, you're my sister. Kagome-sensei is my crazy uncle, if he wants to be. Mari-sensei isn't quite a big sister, and isn't quite a mother, and maybe we'll come up with a new word for what she is, but she's as much one of us as the rest. Maybe it's time we asked her about dropping the 'sensei'. And Akane being my sister would have been weird before, but I guess that problem has solved itself.
"Keiko, we are your family now. The word 'value' doesn't mean anything to family."
"Hazō, I do not know if I am ready to have a family," Keiko said with an edge of panic.
"Look at it this way," Noburi chipped in, "nobody is born knowing what to do. Especially into a family as weird as this one. We're all going to be making it up as we go along, even me."
"But I have already failed my birth family!" Keiko pleaded. "Profoundly and repeatedly. I even brought suffering to Ami!"
"Keiko," Hazō said bluntly, "we don't care. We are not interested in whether you can justify yourself. We are not interested in whether you think you're good or bad. We are not interested in whether we could have got a better deal, or whether you're high- or low-maintenance, and above all, we don't care if you succeed or fail. We've decided that we're your family, and there's nothing you can do about it."
"Oh, while we're on the subject," Noburi said with uncharacteristic awkwardness, and a certain amount of squirming which he ultimately suppressed, "I've practised saying this a lot in my head over the last couple of years, and even if the context is nothing like I'd imagined, I think it's time to put that practice to use.
He looked straight at Keiko.
"I love you.
"In an 'if you can get over Mari-sensei, I can get over you, dammit' kind of way," he added a few seconds later, "which is practically fraternal.
"So that's the L-word out in the open," he concluded. "We're all allowed to use it whenever we want, without worrying that it might be embarrassing, or inappropriate, or too strong, or that it might be taken the wrong way, or any of that other crap that's been going through our heads—or my head, anyway—since this clan business got real.
"Oh, and Keiko," Noburi gave a grin, "family tip from an expert: watch out for your younger siblings. Troublemakers, the lot of them."
Keiko snerked even as she made a motion with her sleeve which in no way resembled someone trying to wipe away tears.
"Next order of business," Hazō said, drawing attention away from Keiko while she composed herself, "is bringing back Akane. We've all failed her as a family, and we're going to fix that the second we get to Leaf. Political concerns and clan priorities be damned; we've got a lost sister to bring home."
He looked straight at Keiko.
"I love you.
"In an 'if you can get over Mari-sensei, I can get over you, dammit' kind of way," he added a few seconds later, "which is practically fraternal.
"So that's the L-word out in the open," he concluded. "We're all allowed to use it whenever we want, without worrying that it might be embarrassing, or inappropriate, or too strong, or that it might be taken the wrong way, or any of that other crap that's been going through our heads—or my head, anyway—since this clan business got real.
"Oh, and Keiko," Noburi gave a grin, "family tip from an expert: watch out for your younger siblings. Troublemakers, the lot of them."
Keiko snerked even as she made a motion with her sleeve which in no way resembled someone trying to wipe away tears.
"Next order of business," Hazō said, drawing attention away from Keiko while she composed herself, "is bringing back Akane. We've all failed her as a family, and we're going to fix that the second we get to Leaf. Political concerns and clan priorities be damned; we've got a lost sister to bring home."
-o-
"I like it," Jiraiya said. "Even a slug wouldn't be dumb enough to go for a full frontal assault on an unknown enemy who can see you coming, which means it has shock value. Also, if it works and she doesn't crush you like said slug, it could be a big leap forward at a time when we won't have many more chances to deal with her. I get this itch whenever somebody somewhere is pointing a dagger at my back, and coming back to Leaf without reaching an understanding is going to drive me crazy. I hate wildcards unless they're me or mine."
Like a certain team of missing-nin.
"What do you have to offer her?" Keiko asked. She still seemed shaken from their conversation, and visibly uncomfortable helping with a plan involving her own sister, but she was trying. As for Jiraiya, Hazō and Noburi had taken him aside earlier and persuaded him to have mercy, emphasising the epic victory Keiko had achieved in spite of her troubled mental state, as well as her public boasting on behalf of the clan.
"Remember us speculating she might be in trouble?" Hazō asked. "A lot of what she's doing makes more sense if she's desperate and needs to get herself outside support in a hurry. We can give her that."
"Whether we want to is more complicated," Jiraiya said. "We're talking throwing our weight behind Mori and her supposed faction, of which I have yet to see hide or hair, without any real knowledge of Mist politics. We don't know whose toes we'd be treading on, and which diplomatic relations we'd be cutting off by allying with the wrong person."
Hazō glanced at Keiko, whose fingers were digging into an armchair that would have cost his family a month's income not that long ago. His sister really did have no respect for furniture.
"The potential benefits vastly outweigh the risks," she insisted. "As you say, we do not know which of Ami's enemies we may be provoking. However, she does. There is no reason why we cannot negotiate assistance with the relevant information as a condition."
"Good point," Noburi said. "She's got no reason to lie about who's after her, not if she wants us to pull her chestnuts out of the fire. Plus it gives her incentive to be our guide as far as clan politics are concerned. Because let me tell you, you don't want to tap-dance across that swamp. You guys in Leaf had the Hokage keeping order, but the Mist clans had to work around Yagura, the secret police, an overpowered bureaucracy, and lovely little surprises whenever the Mizukage decided the current laws weren't harsh enough. You have to remember, Mist wasn't founded by a Kage handing out Tailed Beasts like candy. It was founded by a Kage sweeping across the Water Country in a bloody tide that drowned everyone who stood against him."
Like a certain team of missing-nin.
"What do you have to offer her?" Keiko asked. She still seemed shaken from their conversation, and visibly uncomfortable helping with a plan involving her own sister, but she was trying. As for Jiraiya, Hazō and Noburi had taken him aside earlier and persuaded him to have mercy, emphasising the epic victory Keiko had achieved in spite of her troubled mental state, as well as her public boasting on behalf of the clan.
"Remember us speculating she might be in trouble?" Hazō asked. "A lot of what she's doing makes more sense if she's desperate and needs to get herself outside support in a hurry. We can give her that."
"Whether we want to is more complicated," Jiraiya said. "We're talking throwing our weight behind Mori and her supposed faction, of which I have yet to see hide or hair, without any real knowledge of Mist politics. We don't know whose toes we'd be treading on, and which diplomatic relations we'd be cutting off by allying with the wrong person."
Hazō glanced at Keiko, whose fingers were digging into an armchair that would have cost his family a month's income not that long ago. His sister really did have no respect for furniture.
"The potential benefits vastly outweigh the risks," she insisted. "As you say, we do not know which of Ami's enemies we may be provoking. However, she does. There is no reason why we cannot negotiate assistance with the relevant information as a condition."
"Good point," Noburi said. "She's got no reason to lie about who's after her, not if she wants us to pull her chestnuts out of the fire. Plus it gives her incentive to be our guide as far as clan politics are concerned. Because let me tell you, you don't want to tap-dance across that swamp. You guys in Leaf had the Hokage keeping order, but the Mist clans had to work around Yagura, the secret police, an overpowered bureaucracy, and lovely little surprises whenever the Mizukage decided the current laws weren't harsh enough. You have to remember, Mist wasn't founded by a Kage handing out Tailed Beasts like candy. It was founded by a Kage sweeping across the Water Country in a bloody tide that drowned everyone who stood against him."
Hazō thought back to the Kurosawa, who'd discarded their own heir for the sake of the clan's reputation. Had there been some kind of ruthless calculation behind their unforgivable betrayal, rather than common-or-garden prejudice as he'd always assumed?
"So we've covered the ends," Hazō said. "Can we get back to the means? I don't like the fact that she batted me around like a cat toy instead of treating me as an equal. If she can't be honest with me, how am I supposed to trust her with anything important?"
"Hazō," Keiko said carefully, "that was her treating you as an equal. She was offering you the opportunity to play the game at her level. As she found you increasingly incapable of doing so, she shifted to a didactic approach intended to raise your level, with an ambiguous ratio of instruction to personal amusement."
"Come to think of it, she did imply that a lot," Hazō said. "But why would she care about making me a better player? To make me a better husband? A better ally? Then why would she start during our first meeting?"
"Why indeed?" Jiraiya said. "Have I mentioned my barely-controllable impulse to choke that girl to death?
"The obvious guess is that it's a show of dominance: 'I'm not only a better player than you, I'm so much better I can teach you.' Or worse, 'I'm so much better than you that I can give away my techniques and still expect to win.' But showing off that kind of dominance over Hazō is overkill. It's like using the Rasengan to swat a fly."
"I appreciate and respect you too, sir."
"Ooh, I know this one," Noburi raised his hand. "It's a favour thing. Hazō can't refuse to passively learn from her, and when he does, that puts him in her debt. She can go, 'Oh, hey, remember how I taught you how to greeble the quong?' and he can't exactly say, "But I never wanted to know how to greeble the quong, even though I'm totally going to go on to greeble quongs all over the place because it's a really valuable skill."
"Greeble the quong?" Hazō asked sceptically.
"Sure. It's like greebling the zuzubel, but you divide instead of multiplying. I bribed Honoka to teach me so I could shock Kagome next time I was feeling bored."
"Moving on," Hazō said pointedly, "we need to talk about Keiko."
Keiko, lost in thought, abruptly jerked in her seat. "What about me? Do not ask me questions! I told you, I need time to process!"
"Keiko, I was going to talk to you about your sister," Hazō said. He really didn't want to get into the family thing in front of Jiraiya, whom he was deliberately excluding. You had to be able to trust family not to murder you for the greater good as defined by them personally.
"If you're OK with it, and only if you're OK with it, I'd like to try and get a straight answer out of her about why she's treating you the way she is. I don't know what her intentions are, but the fact is, she's hurting you. She needs to understand that, and she needs to be up front about why. I don't think I can work with her if she's going to keep treating you this way."
Keiko shook her head.
"You are free to ask whatever questions you want. We have established that I have no right to interfere."
"This isn't about rights," Hazō said. "I'm asking you what you want."
Keiko didn't answer for a while. Jiraiya's fingers drummed on the table with growing impatience.
"I want to know," she said softly. "Was my failure to rejoin the clan truly such a profound betrayal as to cost me my sister's love in a heartbeat? Had I failed her already at some earlier stage? Perhaps some transformation in her life of the past two years had rendered me unnecessary? I have asked myself these questions and more, every night and every day. I fear to hear the answer, and yet…"
"Understood," Hazō said. "One direct confession, coming up."
"Why should she tell you when she chose not to tell me?" Keiko asked.
"Because she needs me."
Hazō winced on the inside at the implication that, by contrast, Mori didn't need Keiko. Keiko either didn't register it or, more likely, took it for granted.
"The way she's treating you is unacceptable, and we have the leverage to make it stop."
Keiko looked down at her feet. "Not unacceptable," she muttered.
"What?"
"Not unacceptable. Ami is everything to me, even still. She raised me. She saved me from the world. She sacrificed hours and days that could have hastened her meteoric rise to help a little girl who had earned nothing and deserved nothing. If Ami wishes to hurt me, then she may hurt me."
Hazō, Noburi and Jiraiya exchanged glances.
"Kid," Jiraiya said, "I was there with Orochimaru during his last days in Leaf, and that is still one of the most fucked-up things I've ever heard.
"Hazō, do the thing. You have carte blanche."
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What do you do?
Voting closes on Wednesday 6th of March, 12 p.m. London time.
Voting closes on Wednesday 6th of March, 12 p.m. London time.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- They/Them
[X] DO THE THING
-[X] LET THE QMS DECIDE WHAT THE THING IS
--[X] YOU HAVE CARTE BLANCHE
Noburi is severely underrated...
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Fixed, thanks. I think the non-linear timeline broke the threadmark system's will and now it's not even trying.
Unrelatedly, I am delighted to find that when I start typing "Hazō" so as to open his character sheet, I'm immediately offered "cognitive hazards".
- Location
- Kiev, Ukraine
[] Protoplan: Tying Knots And Knoting Ties:
Feel free to grab this plan and us however you want.
A little explanation: since next update should be @eaglejarl's and both he and @Velorien wanted the latter to do Ami talk, I suppose the next update should cover everything before Ami second date.
Also, I assumed that Exam celebrations will start coser to evening, but QM clarifications would be quite welcome. Also also, I vaguely remember us sending Ami letter with invitation to second date, but I don't remember exact time specified. Can we have a timing for tomorrow to plan more accurately and finaly get out of the non-linear hell?
- While we're all together:
- Get Jiraiya to adopt Akane in clan. Reasoning:
- She's tough as nails
- Team Uplift had an established social dynamics, that Akane was part of. Without her dynamics worsened.
- Her strengths play well with our weknesses
- We need her input on our further plans and this is impossible if she's out of the clan secrets
- Do not demand immediate answer
- Mari and Kagome would probably tell they support this too (for what its worth)
- Get Jiraiya to adopt Akane in clan. Reasoning:
- Next morning: Verify Ami's story.
- Ask Akimichi if he'd check out a couple restaurants for us. Offer to pay for his meals if he does. If he asks why, just say we're confirming something for due diligence.
- Have him visit a few restaurants. Inquire about their history, then ask about:
- Connection between Byakuren's Cookbook and Experimental Cuisine.
- Byakuren's Cookbook serving large groups of ninja.
- Have him visit a few restaurants. Inquire about their history, then ask about:
- Byakuren's Cookbook: name-drop Ami for regulars-only menu.
- Ask Akimichi if he'd check out a couple restaurants for us. Offer to pay for his meals if he does. If he asks why, just say we're confirming something for due diligence.
Feel free to grab this plan and us however you want.
A little explanation: since next update should be @eaglejarl's and both he and @Velorien wanted the latter to do Ami talk, I suppose the next update should cover everything before Ami second date.
Also, I assumed that Exam celebrations will start coser to evening, but QM clarifications would be quite welcome. Also also, I vaguely remember us sending Ami letter with invitation to second date, but I don't remember exact time specified. Can we have a timing for tomorrow to plan more accurately and finaly get out of the non-linear hell?
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I thought the fight update was eaglejarls?