Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
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- 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 open voting
- Location
- Yes.
I mean, it's totally possible this Hyuga left afterwards, but...
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Can you explain this? what sabotage they can do? How are we getting smeared? Who are they leaking info to and why do we care? How is it different than working with leaf seal masters?
As for the last one we could ask permission first?
I think they're a bunch of hicks who wouldn't know an Imagawa converter if it hit them over the head with a bladebeast. I strongly suspect their help is mostly useless, and not worth the trouble.
Remember it took Kagome 20 minutes to figure out the locking seal that had them stumped for centuries.
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- Location
- Kiev, Ukraine
You are helpful as ever, thanks!
If Haru's investigation fails, we may want to try to make Hazō approach Hyuuga sealmasters and fish for info about script run.
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Counter point when we showed Jiraiya the seals we got from mountain he was impressed by them. So clearly not just bumpkins.
Plus they have an entirely separate sealing methodology than what the rest of the world has. So might have unique insights to contribute toward solving the problem
What seal? We showed him a jutsu. Akane's Thermostat or whatever it's called
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
These ones that we got from Mountain
- Location
- Kiev, Ukraine
I think it is highly unlikely - what Kagome told us is that their entire sealing is based around researching one single seal. They may have developed different quirky way around, but they lack diversity of opinions to produce anything groundbreaking.
- Location
- The Void
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hazo has exactly 3 sources of seals that are not from Kagome or himself. The Casino seals, Isan and from the merchant in rice
Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
The crux of the matter is that Asuma has kept the potential extinction threat under secret. If we (as leaf, not Hazou) spill the beans now a couple of things could happen.
1) other villages trust us on this one and send their own to help.
In which case we will be forced to cooperate whit other seal masters and summoners of which most of leaf have no trust (no one but us is eager to cooperate whit foreign agents that may work whit us one moment and stab us in the back the next), there is no guarantee that they will not steal sealing secrets. and finally, even after successfully saving the world before, rock immediately kicked us when we were down, and given that we have the most summoners we are the ones that lose the most.
2)They call bullshit on our plea for help and think that we are creating a superweapon base on seals (given that most of the senior seal masters are indeed busy working on something) in which case we end up like swirling tides.
i think Asuma believes that this is best handled as an internal affair unless it proves too much.
as for treason, I just assume that everything we do is this by default
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Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
so do we, now that we had looked at it.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
I'm fairly certain its a "perfect copy of the Earth Clone."
We also haven't spent the requisite ten minutes seeing if Hazou's Earth Clones' Earth Clones range-leash to Hazou or to the parent generation of Earth Clones either.
Jiraiya was talking about the number of blanks we have to share. He didn't know what these seals do. We don't know what they do. I think that Isan will be essentially no help. But I also don't think there's a tremendous cost to roping them into helping out so if Asuma okays it first I'm fine with it.
Is there a benefit to this? Earth Clones don't really have a range so much as a duration right? So when they expire Hazou could just make more. I guess there's a very specific situation where you're being pursued and you want to send your pursuers after a few false trails. In that case you might want them to chain durations so you get longer than 10 minutes worth of false trail. But we have SCs who can do a much better job. I wouldn't be surprised if basic ninja tracking 101 had a whole week on how to tell an elemental clone from an actual ninja.
Emstar
The Shining One
- Location
- Trapped in an extradimensional rift.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Yes, there is a 100m range limit. If the Earth Clones leash off of other Earth clones instead of leashing to Hazou, then that is an interesting design feature thats present in the magic(?) system which can have implications.
(I note that we haven't actually bothered to do any sort of investigation into how our ninjutsu actually seem to work besides some very minor and sporadic A/B testing about 400ish chapters ago. We should just do this when its an experiment that takes ~10 minutes to an hour to do in character from time to time.)
- Location
- Italy
OPSEC, the Great Seal is one of the most complicated seals in existence, i'm pretty sure what little can be understood is leagues above current sealcrafting. It's not something to be shared with people that are not even allies, unless Asuma decides to go for full international cooperation.
EDIT: also they would, almost surely, be completely useless.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
On the other hand, constraints breed ingenuity. While in most cases this will simply be reinventing the wheel but worse, it also holds the potential to reinvent the wheel but almost-as-good-for-conventional-purposes-but-actually-really-useful-for-conventially-hard-purposes.
For all we know there's something called the Mikihako Harmonic Inverter that's twenty steps down the Isan tech tree that's generally worse than the Takawa Harmonic Inverter except when using between 9 and 13 connections, which is an edge case that the Takawa Harmonic Inverter always struggled with and required a really complicated workaround if you didn't want it to clog up whenever there's an irregularity in the chakra flow.
We shouldn't expect the seals they produce to be as good as the seals produced by the mainstream sealing traditions, but that doesn't mean they haven't made anything the mainstream traditions can learn from.
None of that technobabble is canonical, to be clear, it's just there to be an example of the line of reasoning I'm thinking of.
This is basically why I want to ask Asuma for his thoughts first. If he has no problem with OPSEC than I don't think we need to worry about it.
I don't see why they would be completely useless. They built their sealing tradition, but random walks will produce innovation that the wider world haven't seen.
Chapter 433: Noir Detective Haru
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"How are you doing?"
Haru looked up to see Akane leaning on the door, wearing her green jumpsuit with arms crossed on her chest and her standard open, interested expression.
He tossed the current stack of papers on one of the multiple teetering stacks that sprawled across his wobbly desk. It was the final straw needed to shift the balance of the desk towards its slightly-shorter leg. The whole thing dipped an inch which made the stack collapse, spilling pages across two of the lower piles which in turn lost their balance and sent an avalanche to the floor.
"FUCK!"
She suppressed her smile and moved forward, helping him gather everything up. He was careful to keep his eyes on what he was doing so that he could get his anger and frustration under control before engaging.
"How's it going, for real?"
The papers crinkled in his hand and he forced them to relax as he pasted a smile to his face. "It's going fine. I'll have a summary for you by end of day."
"I really need to get away from the clan paperwork for a bit and think about something interesting. Can you just tell me now?"
He took a moment to breathe and unclench his jaw, reminding himself that for right now she was his Clan Head and if you were stuck being a clan member then you needed to be a good little ass kisser with a polite face and three bags full. He wasn't sure if it was better that she was nice and sweet and always phrased things as questions instead of just giving orders the way a commander should because—stop. His Acting Clan Head had issued a politely-phrased order.
He took a deep breath to get himself under control. "This stu...this idea that Hazō gave us, that the Hyūga engineered the bank run for their benefit by buying scrip in bulk and not using it? I can't disprove it but it's still f...but I still don't see it. Why would they do that? What's he thinking?! It's the—" He cut himself off and took a deeper breath.
"Not fond of paperwork, huh?"
He unclenched his jaw. "I have no complaints."
She smiled. "Of course you don't, Haru. You wouldn't complain if Hazō ordered you to jump off a cliff. It's not who you are."
"Isn't that what clan means? Whatever your Clan Head says, you do it with a smile on your face? And in return he makes sure that your family has plenty to eat and your little sister gets a doctor when she's sick."
"Haru...you know that Hazō would never kick you out just because you said something he didn't like, right?"
"...Of course."
"He really wouldn't."
"Sure." He glanced down at the papers. "Is there anything else?"
She sighed. "Run it down for me. What have you found?"
"Our exchange kept track of who was exchanging the scrip, when, and in what quantities and denominations. This"—he gestured at the papers—"is all of it for the last two months. No Hyūga so much as set a toe in the exchange the week before the run. They weren't that frequent beforehand but there were some—one person every four or five days, exchanging a few score or sometimes a few hundred. Mostly cashing in, although they did buy some occasionally."
"What about the Hagoromo?"
He snorted. "They've never gone anywhere near the exchange. Antique-fondling bastards."
She nodded thoughtfully. "You're right about the Hyūga being an unlikely choice. I don't know why they would be attacking us. Hinata has never been an enemy."
"What about that thing during the Exams? Didn't she say something to Hazō about being the enemy of the Gōketsu?"
"You mean when she was talking about how her father wouldn't support Jiraiya remaining on as Hokage? I think it was more like 'opponent' or maybe even just 'not allies'."
"What's the difference?"
She laughed and shook her head. "You have a very straightforward view of the world, don't you?"
He shrugged, not laughing. "It's worked so far."
"I don't know about the Hyūga. Certainly they were doing something around this but I don't see why it would be intended to hurt us. If they were buying the scrip, why would they want to crash it?" She moved into the office and took the visitor's chair.
Haru resumed his own seat and put his feet up on the desk. He grabbed a canvas ball of uncooked rice that he used as a fidget toy and rolled it between his hands.
"The thing I don't get," he said, "is where did the Hagoromo get all their scrip?"
Akane blinked. "What?"
"Where did they get it? They didn't get it from us and it was a huge amount. Were they collecting it a few coins at a time? That would have taken months, and not a few of them. None of the merchants I've spoken to said anything about Hagoromo buying scrip from them. In fact, a couple of them made a point about the Hagoromo refusing to accept scrip as change. Given all that, where did they get it?"
"Huh." She leaned back, ankles crossed and hands folded on her stomach as she looked up at the ceiling. These brainstorming sessions had become common enough that both of them no longer stood on ceremony.
"Could have been a couple of large private acquisitions," she said after a moment. "Maybe their Clan Head was in a high-stakes karuta game?"
He snorted and tossed the ball up, catching it in the opposite hand. "It must have been one hell of a good night for him. Remember how when he started spending it he cleaned out four goldsmiths and bought a hundred square miles of land?"
"That's another thing that bothers me," Akane said. "Why that land? It's useless. The soil is stony, nothing grows, nothing lives there."
"Maybe there's rockskippers?" he suggested doubtfully. "Their eggs are valuable."
"There isn't even water," she said. "It's too high. The rivers route around it."
"Maybe they want it as a training facility. Or a seal research station."
"They don't have any sealmasters."
"What about Harumitsu?" The kid seemed not awful for a Hagoromo. Plus, good name.
"I doubt it. Hazō says he's got promise, but he's still learning and they don't trust him anyway." She paused, thinking. "Although I guess maybe they're thinking ahead?"
Haru snorted. "Maybe. Just because they're arrogant backwards oppressive bigots doesn't mean they can't think ahead." He threw his ball again, harder this time so that it bounced off the ceiling.
She chuckled. "Don't hold back, Haru. Tell me what you really think about them."
"What? Not that long ago we were out to annihilate them."
"Yes, and now the Hokage has ordered us to be cordial. And because we are a loyal clan, we are being cordial."
"Because we can't afford to have Hazō commit treason again," he muttered, throwing the ball again.
The chair squeaked as Akane sat up. "What was that?"
He caught the ball and looked over. When he saw the thundercloud on her face he also sat up, carefully composing his face. "Nothing. We are a loyal clan, of course."
She studied him for a moment, chewing on her cheek as she visibly decided whether to have this fight right now. "We truly are loyal, Haru. Hazō is loyal. Yes, he said a couple of things that were taken badly but he didn't mean them the way they were heard. It was a mistake."
How did one mistakenly threaten to talk the evil Sannin into assassinating the Hokage? Also, which was better—a Clan Head stupid and/or careless enough to accidentally threaten treason (twice!) or one who was so amoral that he was willing to do it voluntarily and then cover his sins with a claim of stupidity and obliviousness?
"Of course," he said. "Just a mistake. I'm sure that Lord Jiraiya and Lord Hyūga simply misinterpreted an honest comment. Twice."
She studied him for a moment, then decided to let it go. She leaned back in ceiling-oriented contemplation once more.
"What about the rest of Hazō's theory?" she asked. "The people showing up at the bank were Hyūga patsies. The Hyūga tipped off the Hagoromo because they are actively allying against us and they wanted to earn points by letting the Hagoromo cash out in advance."
"Yeah, he tried to cover all his bases," Haru said, tossing the ball again. "What was it he said? 'Could be the other way around—Hagoromo then Hyūga—or could involve other clans too.' I'm sure he's right—it probably was either the Hyūga, or the Hagoromo, or some other clan." He bounced it off the ceiling again. "Oh, or maybe some clanless."
"Okay," she admitted, "but you have to admit it makes sense. They're both in the conservative block. If the Hyūga were going to do it they would definitely let their allies know."
He caught the ball and glanced over at her. "Weren't you the one asking why the Hyūga would be actively going after us?"
She grimaced. "I suppose."
He started tossing the ball again. "I don't get this. We've got a group that hates us which is spending our money and a group that doesn't particularly care about us that is buying it but not spending it. And we're thinking that it's the group that doesn't care about us that's causing the problem?"
"It's what he thinks."
He caught the ball and tipped his head down to study her. "I've got a problem," he said after several long seconds.
She sat up. "What's that?"
"I've got to do the job I'm assigned, which is figuring out this bank run. I've also got to be respectful to the Clan Head."
"And?"
"What do I do when those things run into each other?"
"Are they running into each other?"
"Maybe. You're the Clan Head right now and you're also his girlfriend."
She studied him carefully. "Say what you need to."
"He's pointing us at the Hyūga even though it makes no sense. Is he dipping her pigtails in the inkwell?"
She laughed. "Are you seriously asking if he's sweet on Hinata?"
He shifted uncomfortably. "I mean...aren't you and Yamanaka and Hazō all...doing...stuff? Together? Why not her too?"
Akane's cheeks burst into flames. "We aren't doing anything!"
"Really? Because that's not what the estate is saying."
"What are you talking about?"
He rubbed his jaw, wondering if he really wanted to walk this road. "The two of you have been in and out of his hospital room. A lot, and staying for long periods. Yesterday, Yamanaka went in with an overrobe but she wasn't wearing it when she left."
"She spilled tea on it and Hazō put it in a storage seal for her so that the stain wouldn't have time to set before she could get it to the laundry."
"Uh-huh."
"She did!"
"Sure. Anyway, I've got to wonder if maybe Hazō wants to get Lady Hyūga as another..." He trailed off, not knowing what the polite term for 'piece on the side' might be.
Akane studied him. "Were you going to finish that sentence with 'piece on the side'?"
He shifted nervously in his seat. He had seen her fight, and she was between him and the door.
"Of course not?" he tried, cursing himself when it came out as a question.
She stared him down for another eternal second, then snorted and shook her head. "No, Hazō is not trying to start a romantic relationship with Hinata. He's said that he finds being around her exhausting and he worries about the security implications."
"Okay. In that case, we're back where we started: The people who hate this clan were using our money, the people who aren't that against us were buying it up. Maybe Hyūga got pissed that Hazō was courting Yamanaka and not her and she wanted to make a show of supporting him? Literally a buy-in."
"Haru, not everything is about Hazō, Ino, and my love life. Besides, we got together with Ino after the bank run."
"...I guess. Maybe she wanted to make an alliance with us and buying up the scrip was something of a good-faith gesture? She wanted to show that the Hyūga were supporting the idea?"
"Could be. Or maybe the Hyūga were opposed to the idea and buying it up was their solution for how to shut it down—take all of it out of circulation."
He leaned back and started throwing the ball again. "Nah. They aren't stupid, they had to know we'd just make more."
She sighed and unsealed a mug of tea. "You want one?"
"Sure, thanks." He leaned over and took the tea. She unsealed another for herself and leaned back again, rolling the hot porcelain between her palms contemplatively.
"I wish there was someone we could ask," she said. "There's got to be someone who knows something."
He took a sip. Bitter and smokey, the way he liked it. Akane tended to remember those things. "I could approach the Oyabun."
"The Yakuza? That seems like it could be a problem. They're approved—well, tolerated—by the Tower because they keep the peace. The Hokage doesn't have to assign ninja to police work because the Yakuza do it. I don't want to owe them favors but messing with them could have implications that I don't understand."
"I've spoken to some lower-level Yaks already." Yes, let's go with 'spoken'. "Nothing that will get anyone worked up—I kept it down at the level of Second Lieutenant and below. I've tapped every well I can find at that level so either I go up or leave it alone."
"Leave it alone for now." She sighed and got to her feet. "I have a meeting with Gaku. Keep thinking and I'll check in again tomorrow." She looked around for a moment. "We need to get you a better office. This place is a little grim."
Surprisingly, that hit home. Why he was invested he wasn't sure, but...no, actually, he was sure. This was the first space he'd ever had that was his, unshared with anyone else. He had chosen the painting and hunted the desk up at a pawn store with his own money that he had earned on missions, not been given like a pat on the head by his clan masters.
"What's wrong with it?" he demanded, trying to keep his voice even. "I like it."
"Well, for one thing, the desk is too small for the amount of files you're using. We need to get you a side table and some drawers so you can keep them organized. Second, it's cold. Let me get you a brazier at least."
"It's fine. I like it cold." Well, no. 'Like' would be the wrong word. He was used to it and even though money wasn't an issue anymore he couldn't see a reason to waste it.
She put her hands on her hips, arms akimbo, and gave him an 'oh really' look for the ages.
"I do! It's my office, leave it alone."
She gave up on the glare, nodded, and raised her hands in acceptance. "Fair enough. Still, can I at least get you a bigger desk that has four legs all the same length?"
"I like my desk."
"...Okay. I'll leave you to it. Talk tomorrow?"
"Sure."
XP AWARD: 4
Brevity XP: 1
Vote time! What to do now?
Voting ends on Wednesday, May 19, 2021, at 12pm London time.
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Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
awww, but really she is one of twoclan heads that don't think Hazō is a traitor, the other one is sasuke and they are both the very definition of bias in this matter.
Haru welcome to the speculation about Hazō's romantic life club, you may talk to our president @RandomOTP to get membership.
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