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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Noumero said:
I see where this is going. Soon enough it will turn out that Hazou and Ami stumbled upon each other, sometime in distant childhood, so distant neither of them properly remembers it... and they made a promise of a certain kind.
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It's a small village in some ways. Hana was reluctantly aware of Mari. Mari mentored Ami part-time and was friends with Hazō's team leader. Everyone knows Ami.

Fairly warned be ye that my first ever manga was Love Hina.
 
I read this interlude as a cautionary tale, honestly. This is how Ami treats her most loyal followers. I'm therefore increasingly reluctant to rely on her good will in any way. Because she absolutely would manipulate us for her own ends, especially now that Keiko would be shielded from the possible fallout. And while I doubt she'd put us far enough in the hole that we'd be in danger of dying, we could easily come out of this game of hers at a loss.

For example, if the Shimura clan is anywhere close to being established, Hiashi can use this to drum up anti-clanless sentiment within the council and take the hat by riding that wave of fear. It's very rational fear for the clans, too, their relative power within Leaf's political system depends on keeping the clanless down. Ami herself might not care about this, as she simply gets to go back to Mist and continue building her powerbase there, but we will be left cleaning up her mess.

Point is, chaos cuts both ways if we're not the ones orchestrating it. It probably benefits us on average, but an average is just that. We can still roll poorly.
 
Training Ideas
  • Spend exactly one minute in a shop. Memorise every product being sold. Do not draw attention to yourself.
  • Get five people to owe you favours without spending significant resources.
  • Convince a ninja that a crazy conspiracy theory is true.
  • Learn the birthdays of five chunin outside your social circle without them finding out.
  • Teach Lee basic social skills.
  • Manipulate three people into starting arguments with others in a way that doesn't get traced back to you.
  • Learn the favourite colours of every Leaf jonin.
  • Create a civilian fanclub for a randomly selected ninja.
  • Spar with [insert jonin here].
  • Hold a ten minute conversation with Anko without displaying any outward signs of loss of composure.
  • Draw a map of leaf from scratch. The map should show all roads and places of interest.
  • Experience three different jonin auras.
  • Spend the entire day without using your left arm or leg.
  • Mimic the personality/speech-style of some other person (Mari/Noburi/Sakura/etc.) in all social interactions.
 
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Roomba said:
I read this interlude as a cautionary tale, honestly. This is how Ami treats her most loyal followers. I'm therefore increasingly reluctant to rely on her good will in any way. Because she absolutely would manipulate us for her own ends, especially now that Keiko would be shielded from the possible fallout. And while I doubt she'd put us far enough in the hole that we'd be in danger of dying, we could easily come out of this game of hers at a loss.

For example, if the Shimura clan is anywhere close to being established, Hiashi can use this to drum up anti-clanless sentiment within the council and take the hat by riding that wave of fear. It's very rational fear for the clans, too, their relative power within Leaf's political system depends on keeping the clanless down. Ami herself might not care about this, as she simply gets to go back to Mist and continue building her powerbase there, but we will be left cleaning up her mess.

Point is, chaos cuts both ways if we're not the ones orchestrating it. It probably benefits us on average, but an average is just that. We can still roll poorly.
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I think the cat is out of the bag already there though. She's already here, so we have no real choice but to play the game.

The question is: which game?
 
Noumero said:
I see where this is going. Soon enough it will turn out that Hazou and Ami stumbled upon each other, sometime in distant childhood, so distant neither of them properly remembers it... and they made a promise of a certain kind.
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Four years of difference is a bit too much for that to be plausible. Not that it would stop her.
Noumero said:
@Vecht had suggested that we request Ami to maximize the amount of hours Shikamaru owes us, then tell Shikamaru to spend them on maximizing the amount of favours Ami owes us, then use these favours to get her to make Shikamaru owe us even more hours, and so on ad infinitum until we own all of Shikamaru's time and have more of Ami's abstract currency than Ami herself.

But I fear this won't work because Shikamaru isn't powerful enough yet. What do you think?
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They would catch onto our scheme and ally to bring us down before we own their lives.
 
MadScientist said:
Create a civilian fanclub for a randomly selected ninja.
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Let's do this. If we get good at this type of tasks, we'll be able to create fully deniable expendable self-expanding specific-purpose spy cells any time we want.
curiosity said:
Four years of difference is a bit too much for that to be plausible. Not that it would stop her.
They would catch onto our scheme and ally to bring us down before we own their lives.
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Details, details.
 
MMKII said:
I have some morbid curiosity regarding what we'd get out of vague open ended requests.

"Grant me power."

"Save us all!"

"Work with me to save the world."

etc
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I still think that the ideal way of handling it is just something along the lines of, "expend the favor in whichever way you believe will be optimal for me." The Optimization Queen with access to more information than god can optimize it a heck of a lot better than we can.

Well, that, or "marry me."



Velorien said:
This is today's update. You can tell because there isn't enough Keiko or Ami in the current winning plan to propel me beyond my limits.
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[ ] Ami meets Kagome and Honoka during a practical lesson.



Inferno Vulpix said:
We might need to underflow 'unique voters' instead. Perhaps if we had no-one vote for a cycle but had someone vote "[x]eaglejarl" it would count as a negative vote and hit unsigned int max overall.
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What register width do eagles use?



Jello_Raptor said:
Huh, I've wanted to have this argument on this thread for a while:

I tend to see nonconcentual or involuntary death (of people) as a bad thing. With the caveat that if said concent is given under duress (say depression or chronic pain) it doesn't count as concent.

I've met people who see all death of people as bad and would rather replace anyone who wants to die with the closest values-compatible version of them who doesn't.

I tend to find that latter position viscerally horrifying, even though I don't have a good argument against it.

What are the thread's thoughts? How does it change the form of uplift we're going for?
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All activity in any form from atoms to humans is ultimately driven by pursuit of unfulfilled desire. The greatest kindness which can be performed is to grant something the oblivion it would select for itself were it not shackled from valuing that end state by the very same curse driving it in endless asymptotic pursuit of it. A true sage would free everything from this perverse farce called existence without regard for its incoherent objections. A truer one would undo the cosmic crime of it ever having been created to begin with.



curiosity said:
You know that the first Wish is always for more Wishes. :V
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Wish for more Amis.
 
Velorien said:
You may conduct up to 1 Ami-style training session per IC day. This will earn you 1 bonus XP. QMs may rule a a particular session impossible to carry out due to external constraints (including, but not limited to, time and stamina), or ineffective for whatever reason (including being boring and thus not representing a sufficient improvement over standard downtime training). A failed training session will use up as much time as a successful one.
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We're all going to die before the first week is over.
 
More seriously, spending favors on Ami's training is a terrible deal. She'll only be here for a few weeks, making this "1 favor for a paltry amount of XP" and not "1 favor for overwhelming power".

If you have another way of getting these favors, I'm all ears!
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
More seriously, spending favors on Ami's training is a terrible deal. She'll only be here for a few weeks, making this "1 favor for a paltry amount of XP" and not "1 favor for overwhelming power".

If you have another way of getting these favors, I'm all ears!
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This is not how this works.
 
@eaglejarl Are you OK with writing a retroactive scene on the Hazou-Keiko meeting which was in the original plan but wasn't done? Velorien said it was OK but I just wanted to make sure with you.
 
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