Noburi hesitated as he entered the clearing. The grandiosely-named Gōketsu Sealing Experimentation Facility #3 was a clearing about a mile north of the Gōketsu. It had a granite wall around it, twenty feet tall and three feet thick. The number of seals on the wall and the various other precautions seemed ridiculous but Noburi wasn't complaining. It only took being in the general neighborhood of a couple seal failures before you started being extremely in favor of paranoid safety precautions. The fact that the place was named 'Facility #3' despite being the only facility was yet one more layer of misdirection. Or possibly a joke. Noburi wasn't sure.
Hazō was sitting on the grass with a low table and a pitcher of lemonade beside him. He had a lap desk and low-quality paper on which he was scribbling what were hopefully just notes and thoughts, since he was making no apparent effort to be neat.
"Ahem," Noburi said carefully. One did not just walk into a sealing facility.
Hazō looked up and smiled. "C'mon in, it's safe. I'm just jotting some notes."
"About what?" Noburi said, walking closer and unsealing a camp chair for himself. He leaned forward and poured a glass of lemonade from Hazō's pitcher. His Clan Head raised an amused eyebrow at the unasked theft but said nothing to it.
"Bringing people back from the dead," he said instead.
Noburi stopped with the lemonade halfway to his lips.
"Excuse me?"
"Bring-ing. Peo-ple. Back. From. The. Dead. You might want to clean your ears tonight. Kagome-sensei has a modified version of his cleaner fluid that probably won't dissolve your ears."
"Yeah, I heard you, I just didn't realize you'd gone crazy again."
"I haven't. Noburi, I went through that portal and saw the afterlife. I even brought someone back from it. It's possible because I've already done it."
"Hazō...." What did you even say to that? "We don't actually know that he was dead. You said it yourself: There was a seal failure. Maybe he was just transported to some part of the Seventh Path or something. We both know that interpath travel is possible, and it's a way simpler explanation."
"First of all, we have both traveled to other paths and know what it feels like. I don't know what it's like for you, but it's awful for me. My senses get all wonky and it feels like something is poking at my brain. This was nothing like that. It was like walking through a door; no sense of anything unusual. As to Daizen...please. He was dead and you know it. He got hit in the face with a giant granite tube and then buried in lava."
"Well...I mean...I've seen you create talking porcupine chakra constructs. Seals be weird, yo."
"I was in the afterlife and I came back. There was me, and whatshisname, and a bunch of trees. That's it, no other living things. There should have been birds, squirrels, maybe some seaweed on the beach. Nope. People and trees and that's it. Plus, even the air felt dead. Plus again, being there sucked the chakra out of some of my seals. The Seventh Path isn't like that."
"Huh. That's true, I guess." He thought about that for a minute. "What do you have so far?"
"Right now I'm just writing down everything I remember about the experience, including all the astrological stuff—where the sun was when we went in, what phase the moon was, the weather, whatever. I wish I'd remembered to do a starfix that night, but I didn't. Also what the seals were and my best guess as to when I infused them."
"I see." He thought about that for a little longer. "Let's assume you get it. You can open another portal. Then what?"
"Then we go through, we find Jiraiya, and my dad, and your brother, and everyone else that we care about, and we bring them back."
"What if they don't want to come back?"
Hazō snorted.
"Seriously, what if they don't want to?"
"I'm not worrying about that for now. We'll blow that bridge to fragments when we reach it."
"You said the forest went on as far as you could see, right?"
"Yep. And no, there was no smoke or other sign of habitation. Yes, it would require a lot of searching to find our people."
"Hazō...you can't always win."
"Excuse me?"
Noburi grimaced. "There's an order to the world, bro. We are born, we live, maybe we have children and try to pass on what we learned, and then we die. That's how it is."
"What's your point?"
"What you're talking about...it's not natural."
"Neither is a campfire. Plus, oh, right: You can conjure giant dragons made out of water.
That happens all the time in nature."
"Jutsu are one thing but this..."
"If your brother were here, and some Rock ninja was about to stab him in the throat, you would try to save him. Right?"
"Of course."
"And if he were off on a mission and you got intelligence that he had been captured, you would go rescue him, right?"
"...Okay, I see what you're saying. Still...it just feels wrong."
"Sorry to hear it. Let me know when you either get over it or get a good reason."
Noburi's lips compressed. "Don't be a jerk."
Hazō shrugged. "Don't be defeatist."
"Look..." He trailed off, unsure of where he'd been going. "What if it makes things worse?"
"How?"
"I dunno...maybe if you open too many portals it will break the world or something. Kagome is always talking about how reality is like a cobweb. If you poke too many holes, break too many strands, it might all fall apart."
"It won't."
"Great, but how do you
know?"
Hazō sighed and set his notebook down so that he could lean forward with his elbows on his thighs. "The world isn't like a cobweb," he began, fumbling for the words. "It's more like...paint. On a really weird board. Or maybe on a river. We poke holes in it every time we travel to the Seventh Path, but they don't shred reality, and the connections heal over."
"Yeah, but that's when the channel is being made from the Seventh Path and we're only being carried down it. If we're actually breaking the hole open from our side..."
Hazō shook his head. "I'm certain that it's not an issue. When I read the Pangolin Scroll, my bloodline tried to copy it into my brain. Things got weird and I found myself seeing...I guess you'd call it what's 'behind' the paint. I don't remember it and I can't describe it, but I know it isn't a cobweb."
"Huh."
"Yeah."
Silence hung in the air as Noburi thought and Hazō waited on him.
"Do you think people age over there?" Noburi said at last.
"I intend to find out."
XP AWARD: 0
It is now about 1pm.
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, October 21, 2020, at 12pm London time.
