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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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[X] Action Plan: Reclaiming Fire


Suggestions:
  • We should also try to use Naruto's nigh endless pool of Chakra. He feels well enough to spend 1000s of chakra on wedding related shenanigans, he can act as a battery for the good of Fire.
  • Prioritize waterways. They are basically free real estate. I don't think there are water borne chakra beasts capable of fitting in the river that are a threat to Noburi.
    • Mist can't do the same thing, because they don't have rivers, they have oceans.
  • Possibly ask the Nara for an assist. Do they have maps of chakra beast populations?
  • We might get a crapton of money for this. Do we want to bring in others, in order to share the wealth for political gain?
  • Do we want to hire civilian trackers? The people probably have a good idea of where everything is.
  • Since this is a capture and drain mission, do we want Kagome scribing goo bombs on repeat?

How many chakra beasts do we think there are? This will be really, really hard to calculate.

Okay, chakra humans come in at 5%. Google says the US has 30 million deer / 3.7 million square miles = 8 deer per square mile. Keep in mind, those are post industrial stats. Assume pre industrial of ~80/mile^2, so we have 4 chakra deer per square mile. Maybe less?

I guess the real question is how often we find them. The answer to that is usually :constantly.

So the real question is "does it take more chakra to subdue them than to beat them?" I think it will take less. The Rampage is evidence of that. We knew where our opponents were, and they were higher density sources, but they were much, much smarter and more dangerous.
 
Why are we pretending Keiko is just going to go along with this without significant argument?
 
MMKII said:
Why are we pretending Keiko is just going to go along with this without significant argument?
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This one doesn't involve killing anyone, and I don't think keiko's problems extend to chakra beasts.

It seems unwise to try forcing her using Shikamaru. She's in a fragile state and we really don't want her to boil over again.

But I'm for editing the current plan a bit: Try to get Naruto involved, if only to ask him to talk to Sasuke (which should take a few minutes of our time at worst), and see if Keiko is willing to go with the chakra beat plan. If Naruto objects to talking to Sasuke about the vote go with it - he knows his old teammate better than we do.
 
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Paperclipped said:
[X] Action Plan: Reclaiming Fire
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I might be wrong, but it sounds like it only works if Keiko summons a literal army of Pangolins — on the order of hundreds — and clears square kilometers of land.
  • She can summon only the Pangolins with whom she has a contract. Success of this operation will require going to Pantsaa and convincing him to order a large number of his troops to form new contracts with her — or, alternatively, spending days doing it manually.
  • Number of Pangolins she can summon is bottlenecked by the amount of water she could drink without dying of water poisoning. Upkeep cost (1/10 of the chakra necessary for summoning per hour per summon, I think?) will exacerbate this problem greatly.
  • There is likely a range limit on summons. Won't we run into it?
As far as I could tell, given our current resources, any realistic version of this plan will, at best, have Keiko summon a dozen of Pangolins, who will clear a singular square kilometer given most of a day. Which raises the question — if this is so profitable, why don't other Clans do that? Why doesn't the MC?

Edit: Honestly, using Naruto would probably be much more efficient. If we want to sell the Pangolins food (would they even be able to digest Human Realm's chakra beasts?), give him and his clones hundreds of storage scrolls to put corpses into.
 
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Noumero said:
I might be wrong, but it sounds like it only works if Keiko summons a literal army of Pangolins — on the order of hundreds — and clears square kilometers of land.
  • She can summon only the Pangolins with whom she has a contract. Success of this operation will require going to Pantsaa and convincing him to order a large number of his troops to form new contracts with her — or, alternatively, spending days doing it manually.
  • Number of Pangolins she can summon is bottlenecked by the amount of water she could drink without dying of water poisoning. Upkeep cost (1/10 of the chakra necessary for summoning per hour per summon, I think?) will exacerbate this problem greatly.
  • There is likely a range limit on summons. Won't we run into it?
As far as I could tell, given our current resources, any realistic version of this plan will, at best, have Keiko summon a dozen of Pangolins, who will clear a singular square kilometer given most of a day. Which raises the question — if this is so profitable, why don't other Clans do that? Why doesn't the MC?

Edit: Honestly, using Naruto would probably be more efficient.
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Ninja don't understand the concept of investing in the civilian economy and welfare. Merchants are too busy trying to make sure that nobody monopolize their sector of the economy and preventing ninja from doing any useful work.
 
MMKII said:
Why are we pretending Keiko is just going to go along with this without significant argument?
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Why would she? It's
  • Safe
  • A display of power
  • A direct act that will help save hundreds of civilian lives
  • All while making us money (assuming the parts of the chakra beasts are valuable)
The only objections I could see from her are that the clan has better things to do with it it's time, or maybe an emotional block against wanting to work with the pangolins so soon? Or maybe this is one of those ninja things, where if we do this other summoners might get the idea too and use it against us? (Does mist have any summoners, do any other villages have re-distributive bloodlines?)

We should probably hire civilian butchers though, that'd be a safe job that is otherwise a huge time sink.


Paperclipped said:
[X] Action Plan: Reclaiming Fire
  • Have Keiko summon as many powerful Pangolins as she can with Noburi refilling her..
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Aren't most chakra beasts around genin level? Quantity might beat quality in pangolins here, and we could sell this as an opportunity for live fire training to less trained pangolins. For 105 chakra, Keiko could summon one of the following options:
  • 3 weak pangolin Genin and a trainee
  • 1 strong pangolin genin, 1 weak Genin and a trainee
  • 1 pangolin chunin (Hazo level) and a trainee
The question is whether a chunin pangolin is three times faster at capture and retrieval than genin pangolins.


(Heck, we could host all sorts of pangolin training/testing sessions that wouldn't be safe to do in their path.)
 
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Kiba said:
Ninja don't understand the concept of investing in the civilian economy and welfare. Merchants are too busy trying to make sure that nobody monopolize their sector of the economy and preventing ninja from doing any useful work.
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The Merchant Council wants to stop ninja from outcompeting civilians. But there's no civilians business of exterminating chakra beasts — they aren't capable of it, ninja's monopoly on all things battle-related is indisputable. If Leaf was in desperate need of arable land and satisfying this need was as easy as hiring twelve chuunin to run around killing chakra beasts for a day, the merchants would have already hired someone to do that.

Edit: In fact, they are doing that. "Kill chakra beasts in that area" was an established type of missions even before till'n'fills.
 
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Noumero said:
I might be wrong, but it sounds like it only works if Keiko summons a literal army of Pangolins — on the order of hundreds — and clears square kilometers of land.
  • She can summon only the Pangolins with whom she has a contract. Success of this operation will require going to Pantsaa and convincing him to order a large number of his troops to form new contracts with her — or, alternatively, spending days doing it manually.
  • Number of Pangolins she can summon is bottlenecked by the amount of water she could drink without dying of water poisoning. Upkeep cost (1/10 of the chakra necessary for summoning per hour per summon, I think?) will exacerbate this problem greatly.
  • There is likely a range limit on summons. Won't we run into it?
As far as I could tell, given our current resources, any realistic version of this plan will, at best, have Keiko summon a dozen of Pangolins, who will clear a singular square kilometer given most of a day. Which raises the question — if this is so profitable, why don't other Clans do that? Why doesn't the MC?

Edit: Honestly, using Naruto would probably be much more efficient. If we want to sell the Pangolins food (would they even be able to digest Human Realm's chakra beasts?), give him and his clones hundreds of storage scrolls to put corpses into.
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Get a graduating genin class of pangolins to sign up en masse? It's an afternoon long training exercise, that really benefits them too. They're not ready for live combat with other summons yet, but will probably hold their own well enough against chakra deer. (And if they don't it's better they learned that lesson on our path!)

As far as testing, we can summon panda and have him run off/be carried off until he unsummons/we're satisfied with the range.

The bottleneck on chakra beast hunting is most likely that it's not safe for normal genin and that chunin+ have better things to do with their time.
 
Kiba said:
But I moved all the answers to the wiki?
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Oops! So you did. That also works great.

Immortal Lurker said:
Okay, chakra humans come in at 5%. Google says the US has 30 million deer / 3.7 million square miles = 8 deer per square mile. Keep in mind, those are post industrial stats. Assume pre industrial of ~80/mile^2, so we have 4 chakra deer per square mile. Maybe less?

I guess the real question is how often we find them. The answer to that is usually :constantly.

So the real question is "does it take more chakra to subdue them than to beat them?" I think it will take less. The Rampage is evidence of that. We knew where our opponents were, and they were higher density sources, but they were much, much smarter and more dangerous.
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It was pointed out to me a few pages ago that I got it wrong and the number is actually 0.5% -- 1500 Fire ninja out of 300,000 people. I forget who said this and I forgot to acknowledge it, so I'm doing it now. Thank you, whomever it was.

Regardless, there is a much higher proportion of chakra critters than ninja.

Noumero said:
I might be wrong, but it sounds like it only works if Keiko summons a literal army of Pangolins — on the order of hundreds — and clears square kilometers of land.
  • She can summon only the Pangolins with whom she has a contract. Success of this operation will require going to Pantsaa and convincing him to order a large number of his troops to form new contracts with her — or, alternatively, spending days doing it manually.
  • Number of Pangolins she can summon is bottlenecked by the amount of water she could drink without dying of water poisoning. Upkeep cost (1/10 of the chakra necessary for summoning per hour per summon, I think?) will exacerbate this problem greatly.
  • There is likely a range limit on summons. Won't we run into it?
As far as I could tell, given our current resources, any realistic version of this plan will, at best, have Keiko summon a dozen of Pangolins, who will clear a singular square kilometer given most of a day. Which raises the question — if this is so profitable, why don't other Clans do that? Why doesn't the MC?

Edit: Honestly, using Naruto would probably be more efficient.
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All of your points are correct. As to why no one else does this: (1) You haven't asked if anyone has. Also, (2) there aren't a lot of Summoners and the ones that exist mostly don't, as I keep saying, give a damn about infrastructure projects or anything that primarily benefits civilians.

Ninja do not care about civilians or infrastructure.

That is not completely true, but it's a good basic rule to work from. Ninja don't need to care. They can travel safely, so it doesn't bother them if the woods are dangerous. The civilians pay enough taxes that the ninja are comfortable, and there's better things to do with your time than traipse around in the woods.

Besides, it's a good thing if the woods are dangerous for civilians. That means they can't run away in order to evade taxes and they need to keep paying for ninja to escort them.

I will separately note that, as mentioned above, you haven't asked if anyone has ever done anything like this before.
 
Noumero said:
The Merchant Council wants to stop ninja from outcompeting civilians. But there's no civilians business of exterminating chakra beasts — they aren't capable of it, ninja's monopoly on all things battle-related is indisputable. If Leaf was in desperate need of arable land and satisfying this need was as easy as hiring twelve chuunin to run around killing chakra beasts for a day, the merchants would have already hired someone to do that.
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Reminder that not only is the Village System to even try this barely in its third generation of ninja, but merchant civilians are only barely seen as "second-class citizens who happen to be rich" - the perception is that it's work for jumped-up peasants paid for by jumped-up peasants, when clans already make up most of the chunins and the Clan Provides.

(another reminder: clanless ninja were seen during the Warring Clans Period as approximately missing-nin, and it's only now that that era is starting to pass out of living memory)
eaglejarl said:
Worldbuilding infodump time! The following are basic assumptions that underpin all the economics and politics discussion.

The world of MfD is not the modern Western world.
​
That sounds simple, but it's not. Multiple times over the years that this quest has been running, we've seen statements like "Any nation that used its ninja for agriculture would outcompete all others", with the clear implication that "and therefore all nations must be using their ninja for agriculture or they aren't rational." Those statements are built on assumptions that simply don't apply.

We acknowledge that the following is oversimplified and offering too much credit, but: 21st-century civilization recognizes that all humans are people, that they all have equal human rights, that everyone is equally capable both physically and intellectually1​, that rising tides lift all boats, and that science is the path to advancement2​.

None of those statements apply in the Elemental Nations.

Think about the exceptions to the above description of 21st-century civilization...actually, no. Let's choose a less politically/religiously charged example. Imagine the American South in 1850; they would have been better off had they freed all the slaves, educated them, and slotted them into the work force as entrepreneurs and skilled workers. Did that happen? No. Was the idea, in that time and place, considered utterly laughable? Yes.

MfD is similar to but worse than the antebellum South, because the division is not based on something as comparatively minor as skin color, it's based on the fact that 0.5% of the population is literally superhuman. Depending on where you are, the attitude towards civilians varies between "beasts of burden that can be trained to talk" to "second-class citizens at best".3​ Fire in general is one of the best MfD places to be a civilian and Leaf in particular is probably the best of that, mostly because Hashirama was smart enough to create the Merchant Council and then personally and ruthlessly enforce their safety until their acceptance became part of the local culture. This likely has much to do with why Leaf is one of the most prosperous nations in the EN.

This moderately enlightened view towards civilians is extremely new; Leaf was founded in the year 1000 and the current year (as of Chapter 267) is 1069. All of the other villages are even younger. Before the Village Era, civilians had no rights and no respect whatsoever from ninja. They were effectively walking lootboxes for ninja to cash in whenever it was convenient.

Consider what has been shown onscreen in highly enlightened Leaf: Civilians matter-of-factly telling stories about physical abuse by ninja. Jiraiya admitting that it happens and usually isn't reported. A civilian detention monitor being sincerely convinced that Kagome was going to kill her, and utterly unsurprised that such a thing was happening. Civilians bowing and scraping whenever it's even possible that they might maybe somehow have offered a tiny bit of offense to a ninja. Civilians walking wide around a ninja in the streets. Hana being utterly dumbfounded at the idea that Hazō might want to help civilians. The fact that till'n'fills are a brand-new invention that people consider ridiculous and vaguely embarrassing.

That's just the social attitudes. Science effectively doesn't exist. Yes, sealmasters research seals and Kabuto researches biology, but they are wildly out of step with the general population, and even then their research isn't that similar to what we consider the norm in the real world. (e.g., the idea of double-blind randomized trials is nowhere to be found.)

Democracy does not exist in any meaningful sense. Every nation is a military dictatorship, de facto or de iure. The disproportionate power wielded by certain individuals distorts everything; Jiraiya could take the leadership of the most powerful nation in the world simply by saying "Do what I want or I'll kill you."4​

When you do societal, economic, or political analysis on the world of MfD, your modern cultural intuitions will not serve you.

Now, is it true that the first nation to heavily emphasize infrastructure-related ninja missions is going to win the everything? Probably, as long as there aren't any civilization-ending wars, chakra-enabled plagues, etc. That does not mean that anyone in-universe recognizes that fact. If you still find that unbelievable, ask yourself this: Why are the real-world developed nations not throwing money at space development and nuclear power? NASA has been a 7:1 profit center for the USA, so why are they on a shoestring budget? Nuclear power is safer and more efficient than fossil fuels, so why didn't it become the norm decades ago? Thorium reactors generate less waste off of more available fuel than uranium reactors, so why are uranium reactors the standard?5​ Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House in 1979; why isn't the USA running a nigh-100% renewable-energy economy?

Bigotry. Cultural blinders. Unexamined presuppositions. Powerful interests that enjoy the status quo and don't want it changed. Politicians who work for their donors instead of their constituents.

The next time you feel the need to say "But it doesn't make sense! They would be better off if they just <thing that is obvious to 21st-century people>!", please ask yourself if the problem can be explained by one of the above causes. If you think the answer is no, go back and check your analysis, because almost certainly the answer is yes.

Now for the good news: The societies of MfD are ripe for disruption. If the Gōketsu can manage to survive for another decade and if Hazō can remain influential in their decision-making then you can most likely transform the world. The first step in that, however, is for the hivemind to accept that the Elemental Nations are not the same as the modern world and that, although the actors within it are rational by their own lights, they do not share your definition of what 'rational' means.

The final objection that you might have: "But I don't agree that the world would be like this!" The reply: "We do." The QMs, after a lot of discussion and debate, have reluctantly convinced ourselves that the world of MfD works on these assumptions. The assumptions aren't up for debate, so you'll simply need to accept them as axioms if you can't agree with them. If that destroys your suspension of disbelief and ruins your enjoyment of the quest...well, there's a lot of other quests out there, and hopefully you will find something you enjoy more. Again, the assumptions are not up for debate.

[1] Yes, not everyone is actually equal -- people vary by strength, intellect, etc etc. Please focus on the general point.
[2] Yes, 38% of Americans believe that the Earth was created in 6 days approximately 6,000 years ago and will fight tooth and nail to deny climate science, evolutionary biology, and anything else that might threaten the teachings of their Iron-Age book. Again, please focus on the general point.
[3] The QMs have not been as good about depicting this anti-civilian attitude as we perhaps should have been, but that is how the world is supposed to be.
[4] Granted, there are limits to how feasible it is to rule based purely on personal combat power. Jiraiya could probably have taken the hat, but he could not have kept it in the long term without the support of the clans. There needs to be some consent of the governed in order for a society to work, even if that "consent" is limited to "not actively rebelling".
[5] Because the USA wanted plutonium for nuclear weapons, and you get that from uranium reactors, not thorium reactors.
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Kylinger said:
Why would she?
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Indeed. Why would she take time off from dealing with her new Nara situation and catching up on any logistics training she is mandated to spend significant time on to implement Hazou's latest completely untested brainchild at an industrial sized scale?
 
MMKII said:
Indeed. Why would she take time off from dealing with her new Nara situation and catching up on any logistics training she is mandated to spend significant time on to implement Hazou's latest completely untested brainchild at an industrial sized scale?
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Because she still has massive self-loathing at her perceived betrayal of the clan, and especially Mari, and will likely go really damn far to make up for that.
 
Ninja are like nomads, jumped up conquerors who don't know how yet to rule an empire who will slowly over generations learned how to rule(If they're lucky). Otherwise, ninja are just folks who know how to kill gud.

Also, a reminder: There are missions that exactly work like this. The only difference is that we don't have any settlers who would had paid for one.

I am also not quite sure if we need arable lands so much as protecting current civilian investments.
 
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Can we (should we?) include Hinata in the Great Pangolin Purge? Her presence could provide significant efficiency gains, means fewer angles for propagandists to somehow make this a bad thing, and might make for a nice gesture signalling to the Leaf patriots that we are good people.

Of course, it might also glorify the Hyuuga at a time when we really need to glorify someone else. Bring Asuma in too, spam Monkey summons? Village Unity, hooray?
 
Esryok said:
Can we (should we?) include Hinata in the Great Pangolin Purge? Her presence could provide significant efficiency gains, means fewer angles for propagandists to somehow make this a bad thing, and might make for a nice gesture signalling to the Leaf patriots that we are good people.

Of course, it might also glorify the Hyuuga at a time when we really need to glorify someone else. Bring Asuma in too, spam Monkey summons? Village Unity, hooray?
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Ninja: Why would we drop so low as to become farmhands?
 
MMKII said:
Indeed. Why would she take time off from dealing with her new Nara situation and catching up on any logistics training she is mandated to spend significant time on to implement Hazou's latest completely untested brainchild at an industrial sized scale?
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Keiko is our sister, both legally(Because she married especially because she wanted to remain part,in some way, of Goketsu, in fact i'm extremely surprised she was put completely outside of our command chain, what would have been the difference if she decided for adoption?) and emotionally.
She is still is part of Uplift, if we say "Sis, we need help with this thing" at worse she will say "I currently cannot because of X,Y and Z, can we do this other day" or "This is bad for X,Y and Z reasons"...i quite literally don't see the problem?
 
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