"Sensei, I had an idea I'd like to run by you," said Hazō .
"Unhm?" Kagome said, ripping some flesh off the duck drumstick he was holding. He was sitting closer to Hazō this time -- maybe eight meters. Of course, he'd made Hazō walk through three separate layers of motion-detector mazes of madness and destruction to come have lunch. Still, it was progress.
"You know my teammate, Keiko? The girl I told you about?" Hazō said. "Well, she's a weapon user. I was thinking that I could make some small storage seals and we could stitch the paper into the fabric of her sleeves so--"
Kagome jumped to his feet, the duck meat spraying out of his mouth as he gibbered in horror.
"Nononononono very bad very stupid don't be turning her brain into goo I thought you liked her why would you do that to her?!"
Hazō raised his hands in a calming gesture that, given how much practice he'd had at it lately, he would have been able to do perfectly even if he hadn't had the Iron Nerve. "I won't! I won't do it, I promise. That's why I was asking."
"That would be--!" Kagome cut himself off as Hazō spoke. "Oh." He looked down at the mostly-eaten drumstick in his hand and the fragments of partially-chewed duck flesh all over the grass. "Um...sorry," he said. He fidgeted for a moment, then sat down again.
"Yeah, sorry," he said. "I get a little nervous around people trying to do clever things with seals."
Hazō was terribly proud of himself for not so much as raising an eyebrow.
"That would be a really dumb thing to do," Kagome said, with a strange inflection that somehow indicated both a lack of intent to be insulting and an utter incomprehension of the fact that it was. "Really dumb. Like, set-your-face-on-fire dumb."
"Okay," Hazō said. "Can you tell me why?"
"When a storage seal emits something, there needs to be free space for the object to form," Kagome said. "If there isn't enough space, the results vary. If you're very, very lucky then the seal simply doesn't activate. If you're less lucky it eats itself. Even less lucky and something half a dozen yards away eats itself. Things get very quickly worse from there." He raised a hand to stifle Hazō's excited comment. "No, it can't be weaponized. People have tried. After a couple of tries they stopped." He poured himself some tea and took a sip.
"They stopped because it was too hard to predict?" Hazō asked.
Kagome looked up at him in surprise. "No, because they died," he said. "Duh."
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