- Location
- USA
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- 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
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Currently, 337. I haven't bothered cutting down on words at all.
- Location
- Yes.
What suggestions are you looking for, exactly?
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Suggestions on inscribing things into granite.
- Location
- USA
- Seal failure:
- Dispel.
- Follow Kagome's directions, implicit and explicit. He's senior sealmaster. Don't argue unless Kagome overlooks something.
- Acknowledge (internally, at least) that looking at the Summoning Scroll harmed his mental health. Hazou is particularly susceptible right now. As a sealmaster, act accordingly.
- Fork 2a - if anyone's injured or earned a TYS point, complete mission and then return home.
If injuries are bad, abandon the mission. - Fork 2b - if no-one's injured and the seal failure was controlled to Kagome's satisfaction, discuss continuing this line of research.
Hazou position: it's fine, just don't go above 12 -- 10 to be safe -- at once..
If Kagome disagrees, yield since this is the scene of a seal failure and he's the Senior Sealmaster.
- Fork 2a - if anyone's injured or earned a TYS point, complete mission and then return home.
- Salterns:
- Use MEW to wall off sections of ocean.
- Freeze with EM.
- Boil leftover brine.
- Complete land sale. Clear said land.
- Guerilla civil engineering in Fire only.
- Prepare signs in granite using inscription jutsu. [SUGGESTIONS NEEDED]
- Signs have quotes or imagery hinting at association to Jiraiya/Gouketsu.
- Build bridges, monuments extolling Leaf's magnanimity, clear out entirely new villages, etc.
- Arrange the work so a skywalking ninja sees Jiraiya laughing.
- Utilize this opportunity to introduce Naruto to the lifestyle of civilians outside ninja villages.
- Prepare signs in granite using inscription jutsu. [SUGGESTIONS NEEDED]
- Find, rebuild, and re-key Jiraiya's contacts/network.
- Use guerilla civil engineering as cover.
- Expand our contact list.
- Kill the chakra beasts we've been contracted to kill.
Wordcount optimized to 228.
Suggestions:
- Remove the "Find, rebuild, and re-key Jiraiya's contacts/network". This seems to require a much longer plan section - two lines won't cut it.
- It seems very hard to arrange massive monuments so that they both are in places that will be seen by people, and make a relatively high-resolution piece of artwork from above (since both "Jiraiya" and "laughing" are complicated)
- "Clear out entirely new villages" is unclear, what do you mean? Same for "Complete land sale. Clear said land."
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Plan updated. WC: 295.
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
Adjusted the plan slightly.
Whoever loves, let him flourish. Let him perish who knows not love. Let him perish twice over whoever forbids love.
(atrium of a House of the Large Brothel); 1520: Blondie has taught me to hate dark-haired girls. I shall hat[e] them, if I can, but I wouldn't mind loving them.
If anyone does not believe in Venus, they should gaze at my girl friend.
There are some more provocative ones as well. Let me know if you need some ablative mod-bait. We wouldn't want to give the impression that the GMs themselves condone the notion that the moral standards of random graffetists might have been different two millennia ago.
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That's not really a solution since it's making the QM do all the work and it won't work.
Using the uplift activities as cover correlate with you visiting the spies. You leak information.
What should be happening is that your visitation to your spies should be uncorrelated with your Uplift activities or known presence in that timeframe.
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- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Current plan
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
If you have suggestions for managing that as far as time management goes, I am all ears. Otherwise I'll take the knock of XP that leaving that up to the QMs to figure out is.
Contact we visited should not be so easily correlated with guerrilla engineering or uplift area of operation. There should be no visible changes. Agents should keep doing what they are already doing.
That probably mean rolling dice over a larger area of Fire.
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Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
"Kurosawa Ren clearly survived due to the Kurosawa Clan Secret Techniques, one of which was displayed prominently on the international stage by her nephew during the last Chunin Exam tournament."
- Location
- Yes.
"Gouketsu Kagome has married and legally changed his name to Hyuga Hiashi. In related news, Hyuga Hiashi is the Rokudaime Hokage."
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I would prefer things that more directly advance our Birthday Present Agenda.
Also, more seriously:
Doesn't Ren surviving BotG look like "Kurosawa Super-Anti-Damage Clan Secret Techniques CONFIRMED!" to the continent at large? I don't think we could have possibly pulled a better coverup off! Good job folks!
...
Chapter 287: The Blotch
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Chapter 287: The Blotch
The world shrieked as, off through the trees, the seals failed. Kagome-sensei collapsed to the ground, face-down in a snowdrift and screaming. The rest of the team instinctively moved to him, Hazō in the lead.
He got to his teacher, who was curled around himself and gasping in shattered breaths, and rolled him onto his side.
"Sensei," he said. "Can you sit up?"
Kagome-sensei nodded and uncurled, forcing himself up to a sitting position.
Hazō gasped; there was a dark blotch on Kagome-sensei's jacket. No shadow had ever been so dark; it drank the light like a drunkard at the wine skin...except for a single pulsing reddish point at the top-left corner.
"Sensei," the younger sealmaster said calmly. "I think you should take your jacket off."
Kagome-sensei looked down and froze in horror. After a moment, he very slowly and carefully began to unbutton the top few buttons of the jacket, keeping his arms and hands away from the blackness over his heart. The rest of the team watched with bated breath as he tugged the heavy fur garment up over his head, keeping the material well away from his face as he did. The blotch stayed happily anchored to the jacket throughout the process...except that when Kagome-sensei finished removing the jacket, the blotch was now on his shirt.
Kagome-sensei studied the situation for a moment, seeming undisturbed by the cold air that was already causing him to shiver slightly. He calmly looked up at the rest of them. "Are you hearing it?"
Hazō listened closely. There was...something? Maybe? A very, very faint sound, so close to the edge of hearing that he wasn't sure if he was truly hearing it or not. It was remarkably slith—
The world blinked and he was on the snowy grass, curled into a fetal position with Akane kneeling beside him, calling his name and rubbing his back. He took a shaky breath and uncurled, pushing himself up to his knees with a grateful smile at Akane.
At various points around the group, three of the Narutos disappeared in a puff of smoke; a moment later one of them, standing about twenty feet from Kagome, nodded.
"Prime here. I can't hear it and neither could Lovemaster or AwesomeSauce, but Multigrain thought maybe he could. He was the one standing closest to you when you went down. He said it sounded like an angry goose very far away." The Narutos all flickered, a surge of Substitution swapping them back and forth until it was impossible to know where Naruto Prime was now standing.
"How are you feeling, sensei?" Hazō asked.
"It's very heavy," Kagome-sensei said with the clinical detachment of someone who knew he was dead and wanted to make sure that as much information as possible survived him. "It leaves me feeling imbalanced. It's also quite warm and getting steadily warmer. I suspect it will eventually become hot enough to burn my skin." He looked down, studying the thing on his chest. "I note that the edges are moving, very slightly, in an apparently unpatterned wave action. It's difficult to judge, but I think that it is growing larger. I can definitely tell that the red portion is enlarging, moving down and to the left as seen from my perspective." His mouth worked as though chewing an unpleasant thought. "The next order of business will be how to dispose of my body such that the shadow creature is destroyed with it. I am reluctant to try explosives for fear of spreading the thing. I see no reason to believe that the thing breathes, meaning that an implosion seal is unlikely to damage it beyond the kinetic effects. Basal option will therefore be full-body destruction. Hazō, use an implosion seal to clear the snow around here. Fox, go collect wood and build a pyre. Build it big, douse it in lamp oil from my supplies. It needs to burn very hot and very fast so as to completely ash my body and the...creature, or whatever it is. Once it's set up, put an Earth Dome over it and knock two holes in, one at the bottom and one off-center near the top."
"Belay that," Hazō said. The Narutos froze, looking back and forth between Hazō and Kagome. "We are not going to let you do that, sensei."
Kagome-sensei glared at him. "I am the SSO and your teacher. You will do as I damn well tell you, and I am telling you to build a pyre."
"Sensei, you said it's growing hotter. What if it likes the heat?"
"The fire is the backup plan, idiot. First I'm going to try burning it off with acid. If that doesn't work, I'll try poisoning it on the off chance that that works. I expect neither of those will work, although the poison I have is a contact poison that will kill me quite painfully. Before that happens I'm going to slit my own throat; the creature may be feeding on my chakra or my body heat. In either of those cases, it should die after I die. If not, have an Earth Clone put my body into a macerator seal, then toss the seal onto the hottest part of the pyre. Give it time to burn, then MEW the whole thing up good and tight and walk away. Oh, and keep the Fox and his clones back. Can't have it getting into that seal."
"Still not the Fox," noted one of the Narutos. "Still locked up in my belly."
Kagome-sensei ignored the comment. "Snap to it. That's an order."
The Narutos glanced at one of their number; he pointed to four of them and they jogged off into the woods. There was another flicker of Substitution.
"Kagome," Akane said hesitantly. "I don't want you to die."
The sealmaster smiled grimly. "Not like I'm happy about it either. Still, nothing to be done."
"Is there any chance that it will fade on its own? I recall the time that you and Hazō conjured talking porcupines from one failure—they dissolved after ten minutes or so, and perhaps this thing will as well."
Kagome-sensei snorted. "I've never been that lucky, girl."
"You cannot give up hope! The fires of youth will sustain you!"
The older man smiled, sad and more than a little wistful. "The world would be better with more people like you, Akane. Unfortunately, I don't have enough youth in me." He untied one of his many belt pouches, pulled out a wad of storage seals, and started thumbing through them.
Akane's face because determined and she started forward.
Hazō leaped to his feet and staggered, his balance still off from his prior attack of world-goes-away. He lunged forward, reaching for Akane's arm, but she twisted out of his grasp. He followed after her, but as he stepped closer the far-off sound of that otherworldy voice lifted in joyful, scritching, slithering song that—
The world stuttered and he was forty feet from Kagome-sensei, drag marks in the snow and a concerned Naruto indicating what had bridged the time gap. He pulled on the Iron Nerve to steady his breathing and bring his body under control, but even the power of his bloodline was fritzing in and out.
Akane was standing over Kagome-sensei; her approach had clearly sent him crab-crawling backwards on butt and hands until he bumped against a tree, but she had not let him get away.
"Damn it, get back!" he snapped, waving spastically at her. "Get back, I say! I'm the senior sealmaster, you have to do what I say and I'm saying get back!" His voice cracked partway through.
"No," she said. "Gai-sensei would be ashamed of me if I did not take every chance to save you, and there is a chance. You mentioned that this might be a creature. If Noburi were here, he would use his medical ninjutsu skills to verify if that were the case. If it is, it might be possible to drive it off in the same way that one drives off wound spirits."
Kagome-sensei glowered at her. "You're not a medic-nin and he's not here."
"It's true," she said, kneeling down beside him. "I'm not a medic-nin, but Lady Tsunade gave me a little bit of training. I at least know how to call up medical chakra. Now hold still."
"Hazō! Get her back away from me!"
Hazō struggled to get his feet under him but his body wasn't obeying. "Akane," he croaked. "Do what he said. He's the SSO."
"No," she said, not opening her eyes. "And please be quiet, I'm trying to focus."
"NO!" Kagome-sensei shouted. "LALALALALA! No meditating for you! Lalalala bleh bah bu bebehbeh! I'm being noisy so you can't focus! Yahh! Yahh!"
She opened her eyes and raised one eyebrow. "Kagome. Do you truly want to pit yourself against the fires of my Youth?"
Kagome-sensei stopped talking and looked nervous. "Uh...well...I mean...you need to get back away from this thing!"
"I refuse. Now be quiet, I'm trying to meditate and, as Lady Tsunade likes to say, 'I can do this procedure just as well with you unconscious.'" She closed her eyes again and folded her hands in her lap...and then promptly opened one eye. "And don't try running away. I'll just have to chase you down, and that just makes it more likely that I would be infected."
Kagome-sensei looked grumpy but said nothing.
Hazō watched as Akane meditated, breathing slowly. The red spot on the blotch had turned into a swooped line from which two more lines were growing.
Seconds turned into minutes and the lines grew larger. Once or twice Kagome-sensei winced and started to rub at the blotch on his chest, snatching his hand away before making contact.
At something like a dozen minutes, Akane raised a hand. Sparks of green medical chakra danced between her fingers, sparking and spitting in a way that was entirely unlike the smooth glow that Noburi could so easily generate. It was like watching a new student attempt an advanced kata on their first day at the Academy. Despite the frozen temperatures, sweat stood out on her face.
Her eyes drifted open and she slowly reached forward, the sparks coming more frequently.
"Akane," Kagome-sensei began—
"Quiet, please," Akane murmured, her voice coming from far away. "I will not touch it." She brought her sparking hand closer to Kagome-sensei's chest and then had to pause as the sparks sputtered. She frowned slightly, her eyes still unfocused and vague as she visibly tried to not concentrate on concentrating while maintaining the placid calm of her light trance. The sparks came thicker and faster, merging together into a shoddy impersonation of Noburi's smooth aura.
"This is a bad idea," Kagome-sensei said, but he remained frozen as she brought her hand close to him. The sparks intensified, the sputtering and uncertain aura flickering and fading, barely held together by the totality of her will. Her breathing was speeding up, sounding more like a runner close to the end of their strength, and the meditative calm was hanging by a thread.
She started at his shoulder and moved slowly downward towards the black spot. Noburi could maintain chakra contact from a thumblength away, but Akane was having to be extremely careful not to actually touch Kagome's skin, and was almost brushing against the vellus hairs as she went.
Hazō's eyes went wide as his ex-girlfriend's hand came close to its target. Not, surprisingly, out of direct fear for her. No, the fear that blasted through him like a shot of cold urine to the heart was due to the fact that he recognized the design that was slowly spreading across the inky blotch in lines of cold fire: Kagome-sensei's implosion seal.
The blotch had in fact grown larger and now covered a circle a large handspan across, centered on Kagome-sensei's xiphoid process. The seal that was slowly being drawn within that impossibly black canvas was barely a quarter complete, but Hazō found himself completely non-doubtful of the fact that it would be functional once it finished. Fortunately, it was moving slower as it reached the complex bit of the design; if it continued at the current rate it would be at least an hour, perhaps two, before the design was complete.
Akane nodded slowly. "I feel—yipe!"
The aura of medical chakra surrounding her hand had finally brushed against the edge of the inky blotch; the instant it did, the thing roiled like stormy seas, then leaped forward onto her hand, surged up her arm, and took position over the front of her jacket. Kagome-sensei's shirt, where the blotch had previously been, was revealed to be lightly scorched.
The green chakra disappeared from Akane's hand as her concentration was disrupted. She surged to her feet and jumped back, looking down at the thing on her chest.
Kagome-sensei put his face in his hands and shook his head in impotent fury.
o-o-o-o
"Let me see if I've got this right," said Naruto Clotheshorse, who had just returned from pyrewood-gathering duty. "It's heavy and getting heavier. It's hot and getting hotter. It's got an implosion seal growing across it. It jumps to anyone who puts chakra on it and that resets the heat, weight, and seal."
"Right," Hazō said. "But it won't jump to my Earth Clone. I was hoping I could pull it onto a clone and then let the clone dissolve, but no joy."
The Naruto nodded thoughtfully. "Shadow Clones are completely sapient and self-aware, unlike regular clones, but the seals we carry aren't the actual seal on Prime's belly, so there's no risk of it interacting with that. What if—"
"Thought of that," Hazō said. "Kagome-sensei doesn't want you anywhere near it for fear it will get on you and then transfer to Prime when you pop, possibly interacting with his jinchūriki seal." He cocked his head in confusion. "Hey, don't you guys share memories when one of you pops? Naruto...well, some group of Narutos have been standing here the whole time. Why not just get the info first-person?"
Clotheshorse shrugged. "We do that a lot, but sometimes it's better to exchange information the slow way. We aren't exactly perfect duplicates, so sometimes a clone will have novel ideas that didn't occur to Prime or any of the other clones. That's a lot harder when we're all working from same-viewpoint data. I'll share once you and I finish talking."
"Huh. Interesting." He paused, thinking about it. "Well, any ideas?"
Clotheshorse looked back and forth between Hazō and Kagome-sensei. The older man was sitting off at the edge of the clearing, leaning on a large granite wall and looking very disgruntled. He was wearing his jacket again and his hands were busy sewing a new section of cloth onto the front of his shirt, which had been completely destroyed.
"What happened there?" Clotheshorse asked, hooking one thumb towards the grumpy sealmaster.
"He made me create an Earth Wall, then he insisted that Akane give the blotch back to him 'just for a minute'," Hazō explained. "He had one hand in his shirt and when the thing jumped back to him he tried to use a directional explosive to blast it, with the wall as a backstop. Didn't work; before the blast, it was on his shirt. After the blast, it was on his chest. Couldn't see anything in between, definitely didn't see it move." He quirked a lip in amusement; he had paused before mentioning directional explosives around Naruto, before remembering that there wasn't a lot of OPSEC left to worry about violating, since other Narutos had been standing here the whole time and, in point of fact, Kagome-sensei had already used the things on Naruto, never mind in front of him.
Shaking the thought away, Hazō gestured towards Akane, who was comfortably stretched out on her bedroll a couple yards from Kagome-sensei, napping with her hands folded over her stomach and a contented look on her face. "She took it back from him immediately after that. Practically had to wrestle him down to do it, which is why he's looking so grumpy."
Clotheshorse nodded. "Okay...can't blow it up, can't stab it, can't move it onto a clone, not safe to move it onto me. That lets out Rasengan, since the chakra might make it jump to me. None of my other jutsu seem well suited. Any problems with shifting it back and forth?"
Hazō shook his head. "No. Also, if you keep pumping chakra into it by way of chakra adhesion or repulsion then it gets heavier faster but it gets hotter slower and draws the seal slower. Kagome-sensei estimates he could wear it for at least a couple hours without any real damage."
"Hm." Clotheshorse scratched his cheek absently. "So, worst case, they could keep swapping it between them every hour or two until we can figure something out?"
Hazō grimaced. "I mean...it looks that way, at least until they need to sleep. Kagome-sensei isn't happy about it, and if he gets it again then I don't know that he's going to want to let Akane take it back." He chuckled. "Although, from the look in her eye I don't think he's going to be able to stop her without literally exploding her. He was never much good at taijutsu and she's become the Demigoddess of Youthful Face Punching." He paused. "Oh, also, he's insisting that he and Akane are in quarantine, so you and I need to stay away from them." He looked around. "Have you guys had any luck trapping a critter?"
"I'll check; it's about time I shared my perspective anyway. Multiple Shadow Clone Jutsu!" Another Naruto appeared and then disappeared. Moments later, Clotheshorse shook his head. "No. We've got a really good pyre ready, but none of me have managed to catch anything large enough for the blotch to fit on. They're working on it." He paused for a moment, then nodded. "CircadianRhythmBoy is asking if you tried pulling it onto a seal."
"Yeah. I tried it with a Party Trick, both active and not. Didn't work."
Clotheshorse sighed and bit his lip. He glanced over to where Kagome sat against the wall, . He leaned in close to Hazō and lowered his voice. "You know that we may not be able to save them, right?"
Hazō's eyes narrowed. "Do not even think of doing anything to them."
Clotheshorse raised both hands placatingly. "Hey, Akane's great and I even kinda like Old Grumbly over there, despite the whole 'tanking explosions with my face' thing. I don't have any plans to hurt either of them. I'm just saying, I grew up around Jiraiya and his bonkers bunch. This isn't the first sealing failure I've seen, and these things rarely end well." He ducked his head in commiseration. "Look, if it needs to happen, I'll take care of it. You don't have to watch."
Hazō studied the other boy for a moment. He could feel his blood freezing, his face going still even without the intercession of the Iron Nerve. Memories of murderous rage inspired by a vicious proctor in the forests of Mist flashed across his mind's eye.
"Let me be very clear about this," Hazō said calmly. "If we exhaust all the options and they need to be killed, I will do it. If you touch either of them, you are declaring war on the Gōketsu, the clan that Jiraiya wanted you to lead, and I will bend every resource available to me to your destruction. That includes the talents of a certain red-headed genjutsu mistress slash infiltration expert. Understood?"
Clotheshorse took a half-step back, raising his hands again. "Hey, no problem. I wasn't going to do anything, I was just trying to be supportive."
"Be supportive by figuring out a way to fix it." He grinned, feral and toothy. "When we get home, ask Noburi to explain what he means by 'Hazō, do the thing'. Until then, unless you've got a helpful suggestion, shut up while I do the thing."
Voting remains open until Saturday at 9am Eastern.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Thats way less bad than it coulda been! Yay!
Ok, lets figure out who or what to stick the thing on?
@eaglejarl
Roughly where are we at the moment?
Ok, lets figure out who or what to stick the thing on?
@eaglejarl
Roughly where are we at the moment?