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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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More importantly: if you die and are resurrected, but someone reanimates your old corpse, which one is the "real" you?
 
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Chapter 515: Just Hold On; We're On Our Way
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    • Naruto opened the door and blinked in surprise.

    "What do you two want?" he demanded.

    "A few minutes of your time," Mari said with an easy smile. "We're working on a very unusual project and you'll either be super excited about it or you'll laugh in our faces. Either way, I'm confident you won't regret talking to us."

    Hazō noted with pleasure that she had said 'we are working on...' The truth was more nuanced; it had taken him an hour to beat down all of her objections and bring her around from 'this is the craziest idea you have ever had and that's saying something' to 'okay, but it still won't work' to 'well...I guess it's worth a shot.' Whether she now considered it to be we who was working on it or whether she was simply trying to show a united front for Naruto's benefit, he wasn't too bothered.

    Naruto stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. He conjured a clone and immediately dispelled it, then opened the door the rest of the way and gestured them inside.

    Mari settled on the old couch opposite the door, elbows on her knees and fingers interlaced. She locked eyes with Naruto, not looking over as Hazō settled silently beside her.

    "How would you—oh, thank you," she said, as a Naruto brought a tray of three teacups into the room and set them on the low table between Naruto and the two Gōketsu. She selected one and took a sip, then nodded in gratitude. Naruto and Hazō each chose their own and raised them in salute.

    "We want your help," Mari said, a small smile on her face, "with a crazy, far-out plan that almost certainly won't work but it's a first step."

    Naruto raised an eyebrow and leaned back, one arm up on the back of the couch, and crossed his legs with right ankle on left knee. "Gosh. How could I possibly refuse such an intriguing and reasonable pitch?"

    "It will take about five minutes of your time," Hazō said. "All you have to do is punch me in the face, psychically."

    "...Punch you in the face, psychically?"

    "You have high-level security clearance," Mari said. "You've undoubtedly seen the report about Hazō's encounter with Itachi and Hidan on O'uzu Island. Specifically the part about how Hazō was attacked by a ninja named Daizen and a seal failure killed Daizen and opened a rift in space?"

    "Sure. What about it?"

    "Did you see the part about how Daizen appeared on the other side of the rift and Hazō pulled him out of there?"

    A shadow of doubt flickered across Naruto's face and he uncrossed his legs, sitting up straight again. "What about it?"

    "I think that was the Pure Lands," Hazō said. "Daizen proves that it's possible to bring people back. People like Jiraiya. And the Third, and the Fourth."

    Doubt shifted towards anger. "You're kidding, right?"

    Mari shook her head. "Look, this idea almost certainly won't work. Bringing people back from the dead isn't like rescuing them from enemy territory, and I personally thought this was nuts until last night." She chuckled. "I still kinda do, actually, but I'm wavering."

    "What happened last night?" Naruto asked.

    "Hazō sat me down and talked to me about it." She glanced over at her adopted son, fond amusement in her eyes. "He's convincing when he's passionate about something. I went from thinking 'that's crazy' to 'okay, not crazy but still ridiculous', to 'well, ridiculous but it wouldn't hurt to try' in the span of an hour." She shrugged, gesturing casually with the hand that held her teacup. "We live in a world of magic. Ninja conjure the elemental powers with a word and a gesture—we even named our nations for our ability to do that. In addition, there are the non-elemental jutsu that touch on souls—your Shadow Clones, according to rumor, are fragments of your soul that you send forth. The Yamanaka jutsu obviously involve sending a part of their souls out of their body, which is why the user collapses. Souls are real, beyond question."

    "This conversation definitely isn't going down strange and vaguely disturbing paths," Naruto said wryly.

    "There are thousands of stories and legends about ghosts coming back," Mari said, not dignifying his comment with a response. "People speaking with those who have passed on, the dead walking the earth. Shoot, forget legends. We've seen people come back from the dead in the last year. Hazō literally pulled someone out of there and Orochimaru came back after being blown to specks." She shrugged. "Of course, maybe he didn't really die. Maybe the Snake Sannin had some way to survive. Maybe he reverse-summoned away while still in the form of a thousand snakes. Maybe he somehow burrowed away from the blast that scooped out a crater three feet deep and compacted the dirt like concrete."

    Hazō noticed as Naruto noticed how Mari had carefully not mentioned the other seven people who had been resurrected that day.

    "Okay," the blond said. "So. Resurrection isn't a pipe dream." The words were light, the same tone that you used when a child insisted that their imaginary friend was real. "Where do I come in?"

    Mari turned to Hazō and nodded for him to take over.

    "I've experienced a lot of jōnin auras," Hazō said. "They are clearly metaphysical, something beyond normal reality. So are the parts from the Dragon that I helped kill. I want to surround myself with things that connect to Jiraiya and then jolt my mind a little outside of normal reality in hopes of seeing where his soul is. I want you to do that by blasting me with your aura. You have a close connection to him and it's possible that will help." He shrugged. "We're working completely blind here, throwing stuff at the wall to see what works. As Mari said, the most likely outcome is that nothing happens, we wasted an hour, and I've got to figure out the next option while dealing with a really bad headache. But, if it does work..."

    Naruto snorted. "You seriously think that you can just randomly see into the afterlife like you're...I dunno, peeping at the baths?"

    "Ooh, good idea," Hazō said, eyebrows rising. "We should do this near the women's baths. It's a location that was significant to Jiraiya."

    Mari's smile became somewhat forced.

    Naruto stared in disbelief for a moment, then started laughing. "Gōketsu, I knew you were...but..." He shook his head, smothering the last chuckles. "Look, you don't seriously believe this stuff, do you? Talking to the dead is bedtime stories and fables."

    "Daizen," Mari said.

    Naruto's lips tightened. "We have no idea what that was. There was a seal failure so all bets are off as to what happened."

    She shrugged. "Sure. Still, what do we know? Seal failures are usually confined to a small area." She carefully did not look over at Hazō, who carefully did not correct her. "This was a portal in midair leading to a very large, open space. A vast ocean, trees that stretched out of sight. A person who had died moments earlier appeared in midair and fell into the ocean. He died again and the whole thing looped. Hazō was able to physically walk in and physically carry him out, but when Hazō went on his research trip to the rift site, Motokazu said there was still a body in the lava." She tossed one hand. "Well, specifically he said that there was a depression in the ground shaped like a person, into which the lava had flowed before burning the body to ash."

    "So, just to be clear," Naruto said, "there wasn't a body and you've decided that the most probable explanation is that Daizen's body was destroyed and a portal to the afterlife was formed, at which location he reincarnated into a brand new body. That, as opposed to, say, the rift led to the Seventh Path and Daizen got transported there the way we know humans can do."

    Hazō shook his head. "No," he said, absolute certainty in his voice. "No human could survive the transit to the Seventh Path without a guide and the protection of a Summoning contract. Period. If you don't believe me, talk to Tsunade or Asuma. In that place, Daizen was as alive as you or I and he wasn't a gibbering madman the way he would have been if he h#d looked in7o the Ovt." He cleared his throat and focused on how it had felt when, on their most recent date, Ino had cupped his cheek in her hand and kissed him. After a moment, the world stopped glistening around him.

    Naruto rolled his eyes. "Fine, whatever. So, you're convinced that the afterlife is real and that you can send your mind through the veil of death with pinpoint precision in order to find Jiraiya. At which point you will undoubtedly pull him back with you and there will be much happiness and rejoicing."

    Hazō shook his head. "No, probably not. Well, I mean, yes, I'm convinced that the afterlife is real and I think there's a fair chance that given enough time and resources we can find a way to interact with it, and that when we eventually bring Jiraiya back there will be much happiness and rejoicing. This particular attempt? No. It's very unlikely that this will work, but you have to start somewhere." He cocked his head, considering Naruto for a moment. "What if it did? I'm going to keep working on ways to bring people back. I've decided that I've lost too many people and I'm not willing to put up with it anymore. I want my father back. I want Noburi's brother back. I want the Third back, and the Fourth. And by the Will of Fire and everything else I hold holy, I want Jiraiya back. So I'm going to keep working on this and someday I'll succeed. I'll find a way to recharge that rift and open it up again. We'll explore the land around there and see if it really is what I think it is. We'll search until we find the people we care about, and we'll bring them back to enrich our lives and strengthen Leaf. This plan that we're discussing? It's silly and cobbled together out of half-baked ideas with nothing more than intuition. It's wildly unlikely that it will work...but what if it did? What if we didn't try this because it seemed silly and twenty years from now, after we get the rift open and search Jiraiya out, we discover that it would have been enough?"

    "You can't be serious."

    Mari turned one hand slightly, the motion serving to shift the jinchūriki's attention from Hazō back to herself. "We're serious enough to try it. It'll only take a few minutes, so what's the harm?"

    Naruto chuckled and shook his head. "Sure, whatever. I'll come along and watch but I can't do what you're asking. I've never been able to do that soul thing that Gramps and Jiraiya and the others do. It doesn't have a lot of effect on me when they try, but I can't do it myself." He shrugged. "Gramps used to say that it came with time. Then Jiraiya would snort and make some mocking comment about how when he was a boy he would walk around throwing jōnin aura everywhere, uphill both ways and in the snow."

    Hazō and Mari looked at each other in surprise.

    "Either way, I'm still delighted that you want to watch," Hazō said, smiling. "Having you there might help."

    "Eh. Mostly I want to see her turn your brain into pudding. That's gonna be funny."

    "You and Noburi really need to spend more time together," Mari said. "You'd get along great."

    o-o-o-o​

    Hazō took a final slow, centering breath.

    His chakra was calm.

    His body was calm.

    His mind was calm.

    He had bathed. He had meditated. He had sucked, briefly and carefully, on a small fragment of Canabisu's mellow candy in order to disconnect a few of the anchor cables that bound his body to the world.

    He had sat and gazed upon the Dragon scales for ten minutes, letting their antithetical nature scrape away more of his connections to reality.

    He had dressed himself in the most appropriate clothes and taken his place at the center of the ritual.

    He had, again, meditated. And now he was ready.

    The sound of the women's baths drifted past, a thing to be noted but not observed. (The memory of Mari hiring six lovely young ladies to 'go have a naked suds fight in the baths, and be sure to giggle a lot' was not permitted to break his serenity.)

    He permitted his eyes to open and categorize his surroundings.

    He sat in the center of a pentagram. Why a pentagram? Why not? It had a pleasing set of metaphor to it—five spikes, one for each of the elemental natures that Jiraiya had wielded in war. Five triangles, the sides of which stood for the Kage, the clans, and the civilians of each of those nations with whom the Toad Sage had warred and peaced. A pentagon, the spikes of war facing protectively outwards and not threatening that which lay within. The boundary of Leaf was not a perfect pentagon, but it was close. Many of Jiraiya's seals used pentagons as their enclosure. Why? Hazō intended to ask; pentagons weren't as physically robust as a triangle, nor were they easy to draw accurately. Yet, somehow, the quirky sage had chosen them.

    Hazō looked down at the bloodstained and oversized clothes he wore. He kept trying to remember Jiraiya's scent and feeling it slip away, but he imagined that it was soaked into the fabric of these bloody clothes, stored for decades in a forgotten laundry seal.

    He looked up, pivoting his head to review the objects at each point of the pentagram.

    A bowl of oil with a blazing wick from which coiled a thin trail of sooty smoke. The Will of Fire.

    The first seal of Jiraiya's pedagogical method. The distilled essence of Jiraiya's belief in the future.

    The first Icha-Icha book—not the first one published, the first one that had ever been execrably written for the sheer pleasure of creation by a teenage boy who had not yet thought to turn his passion into the control device of assassins and spies.

    A charcoal and colored-wax sketch of three painfully young teens mugging for the artist while their amused and barely middle-aged sensei stood behind them. It was waterstained and half-blurred from when Jiraiya's first apartment flooded.

    A plain wooden box. Hazō had carried it around to dozens of elders, asking each of them to whisper a memory of Jiraiya into the box. Tiny pieces of happiness, joy, nostalgia, and grief bounced around in the tightly-closed container.

    To his left rear, kneeling seiza outside the pentagram: Noburi. The little brother Hazō had never known he wanted to wrestle with, mock and be mocked by, fight beside. The one who had given Jiraiya cookies and been named his favorite child.

    To his right rear, kneeling seiza outside the pentagram: Naruto. The godson on whom Jiraiya had doted. The hero that he had trained to preserve Leaf against the day that the Toad Sage no longer could.

    To his left front, squatting on his haunches: Gamasid. Jiraiya's original contact on the Seventh Path, the one who had carried him back to meet the Toad Boss when he first signed the contract.

    To his right front, the ancient, battered, battle-scarred, half-melted forehead protector. The ashes, undoubtedly those of Jiraiya and his traitorous student/murderess admixed, had very deliberately not been wiped away save for one spot at the very center of what had once been the seal of Leaf.

    To his front, Mari. Wrapped in the never-before worn wedding dress that had been in her closet since Jiraiya left for the Chūnin Exams the first time. Her hair was wavy from a quick and not-yet-dried wash in the women's baths where the giggling and suds battling were ongoing.

    She stacked her hands and raised an eyebrow. Last chance to back out.

    Hazō stared her in the eyes and nodded. Never. Do it.

    She nodded and allowed her soul to erupt.

    In the instant before the world became fire and pain, Hazō enacted the one final preparation that he had not and would never tell anyone about: Within the depths of his mind, he whispered a prayer to the mad god Jashin, Lord of Death and Sex. Lord Jashin, if you're there...please help this work. He is an excellent killer, a sex fiend, and I miss him.

    Mari's soul shrieked through Hazō's eyes and drenched the inside of his skull with boiling pitch. He could smell his eyeballs expanding in their sockets, could almost taste them sizzling with a sound like torn muscles and bitter copper. His head went back, his whole body locking tight in agony the only thing that kept him from screaming.

    He allowed himself to fall backwards, the sky whirling as his poorly-anchored and off-kilter mind divorced itself from reality and fled from the pain.

    The world shattered around him.

    Tiny tongues of lakewater lapped at the white-sand shore

    The sand compacted under the weight of a naked foot

    The man raced forward and leapt, white hair flaring around himself as he landed into a squat and dropped back onto his hands, kicking up with both legs. The tattered rags of Leaf battledress rustled around him

    "Jiraiya?"​

    His arms did not support him; he tumbled gracelessly to the ground

    "Damnit, Jiraiya," he grumbled. "You know better than that. Do it again."

    "Jiraiya, it's me! Can you hear me?"​

    "But sensei," he whined, his voice suddenly high and juvenile. "It's not faaaair! How am I supposed to do the Frog Smash with no chakra?"

    "Stop calling it that, you snotty tadpole!" he said, voice now sharply feminine. "It's the Toad Thrust, not the Frog Smash! And how come the old coot gets to be 'sensei' and I don't, huh?"

    "Jiraiya, we're coming! Just hold on! We're coming to get you and bring you back!"​

    "Old coot? Don't you disrespect me, you old bat! Don't you... Don't you..."

    He frowned and sat back, shaking his head. "...you old bat? Don't you... Don't you... C'mon, c'mon... Ha! Don't you dare call me that, Little Miss!" His face lit up in delight at the memory. He leapt to his feet, cackling and capering. "Hah! Little Miss, Little Miss, Little Miss! And then she took the stick! I remember!" He thrust both fists at the uncaring grey sky. "I remember! I am Jiraiya of the Sannin! Student of Sarutobi Hiruzen, God of Shinobi! Battle-brother to Orochimaru of the Snakes and Tsunade of the Slugs! Born of no family, begrudged the Matron's roof, feared by braggarts and bullies! Master of the Frog Kata! Sage of the Toad Clan! Fifth Hokage and patriarch of Gōketsu! Husband of Mari, father of Keiko, Noburi, and Hazō! I am Jiraiya the Great, and you will not have me, because I remember!"









    Author's Note: Hazō has taken a Mild Mental Consequence from Mari aura blasting him. I don't need to roll for it; she can beat his defenses and she can choose not to do more damage than she wants.

    This update covered 1 day. One of Hazō's Shadow Clones did seal prep for MARS and four more read Orochimaru's sealing notes for the XP. No actual sealing was done.

    I'm keeping it time-constrained because I'm unclear on where we stand on the AMITY timer and I don't want to jump over something and have to make the timeline wonky again.

    XP AWARD: 5

    Brevity XP: 1

    "GM had fun" XP: 2
    • +1 for scene: Important conversation with Naruto
    • +1 for scene: Necromancy


    It is now just after sundown.

    Vote time! What to do now?

    Voting ends on Wednesday, .
     
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  • Threadmarks
    • Well.

    That went better than expected. I am going to try to update my beliefs (and all the accompanying activities) to take into account this new information.

    The business with the Frog Thrust is specific enough that we can validate whether or not our experience was likely linked to...something real. Ma and Pa seem like they'd remember that sort of thing.

    If we can verify it, this is significant enough that I imagine we can get Naruto to throw his energy behind the project - with him will come Sasuke, probably, and everyone else who owes Naruto a favour. I think that trying again with Tsunade would be a good idea. We've verified (rather, I've verified with EJ) that Noburi is capable of Summoning Ma and/or Pa, so we can even have them show up and verify. I'm less sure that Orochimaru should be looped in here but it might wind up being an all hands on deck sort of thing where it simply isn't our call.

    I am incredibly glad that we added sanity-checks with Mari. I feel like we would have gotten our faces caved in if we hadn't.

    [X] Action Plan: Next Steps
    Word count: <299 (~230)
    • Immediately:
      • Write down what we remember in as much detail as possible. Do not speak with anyone. Make it clear that you need to get every detail down and distractions are unwelcome. MEW, Earth Dome, Air Dome.
      • Have Noburi go meet Ma and Pa. Have him relay the memory. If it's valid, have him contract with them for a one-time Summon so they can tell Naruto, Asuma, and anyone else Asuma thinks appropriate about this.
      • Comply with any and all efforts to verify that Hazo isn't faking. If the Yamanaka have lie-detecting jutsu, no matter how invasive, submit to them.
      • Attempt the same procedure with Tsunade as soon as is viable. Demand the strictest possible opsec.
    • Akane
      • Do something Youthful and non-violent together.
      • Tone: gently encouraging Akane to talk to us so we can understand/better support her.
        • Stop talking about this at the first sign it's going badly. Pay attention. Do not argue/debate/fix/speechify.
      • How are you doing? How are you feeling?
      • You've been one of our biggest anchors for a long time. It seems like you've lost yours.
        • What are your other anchors?
      • What makes life worthwhile for you?
        • Throw away realism. What do you want to do?
      • It's okay to have no/vague answers.
      • We love and believe in you. Whatever it takes, we want to help.
      • Perform some cheesy-but-innocuous courtship rituals (heart-shaped chocolates, reciting love poetry).
    • Offscreen:
      • Spend a day with Ino. Focus on your (individual) relationship with her. Plan activities of varying moods (exciting, calm, romantic), follow her lead.
     
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    FOOM XP for Chapter 515

    Base XP: 5

    Akane: 60 Resolve -> 1.8x * 5 = 9 FOOM XP
    Hazo: 44 Resolve -> 1.3x reduced by .4 due to 4 SC reading Sealing notes -> 0.9 * 5 = 4.5 FOOM XP + 16 Sealing XP
    Kei: 60 Resolve -> 1.8x reduced by .4 due to Snowflake -> 1.4x * 5 = 7 FOOM XP
     
    RandomOTP said:
    Should also update Shika. He said he'd begin running projections the moment that we began making progress.
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    I think that extreme compartmentalization is wise. Asuma will almost certainly loop Shikamaru in immediately - I'd be surprised if Kei hasn't already told him - but it seems a little presumptuous to do so ourselves.

    @eaglejarl, can we safely assume that Hazo wrote his memories down in as much detail as possible and stored them securely (also keeping a copy of that writing in the IN in case the notes go AWOL) and swore everyone to deadly secrecy, if he said anything to anyone?
     
    Note: I intentionally left it vague what happened after Hazō woke up from his brief vision. He wrote down his experience in detail as soon as possible, but y'all can decide what you told others, whether or not you invited Naruto to dinner, etc.

    The vision lasted under a minute. It felt very real to Hazō but he has no way to be sure that it was. There were no external signs to tell the others what was happening.
     
    FaintlySorcerous said:
    We've verified (rather, I've verified with EJ) that Noburi is capable of Summoning Ma and/or Pa, so we can even have them show up and verify.
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    Wait, you did? I don't recall saying that and if I did I shouldn't have. I had a similar conversation with someone else on Discord and was careful to say that I didn't think we had define a cost for Ma and Pa yet so I wasn't sure if Noburi could summon them at all but that I was confident he couldn't do both in one go.
     
    Hmm... Better result than I was hoping for, no doubt, but what exactly did we witness here, and especially, what did we witness here that was actually helpful?

    Verifying the memory we overheard is definitely helpful as others have brought up. Maybe the location could help, though it doesn't sound as though it has particularly notable landmarks from what we saw?

    Jiraiya himself though... I think it's a bit hard to definitively say what his state is at the moment. Maybe this is a Jiraiya that has been trying to remember and just succeeded. I think perhaps more likely is that this is a Jiraiya that has been and continues to fight to keep his memories. No mention of kagome nor Naruto is a bit concerning that perhaps this is a fight he is losing bit by bit. Maybe something to keep in mind as we interact with mareo, might be applicable to Jiraiya someday...

    But yeah, necromancy project seems good to push, further progress will likely help us figure out how dire Jiraiyas situation is.
     
    eaglejarl said:
    Wait, you did? I don't recall saying that and if I did I shouldn't have. I had a similar conversation with someone else on Discord and was careful to say that I didn't think we had define a cost for Ma and Pa yet so I wasn't sure if Noburi could summon them at all but that I was confident he couldn't do both in one go.
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    The conversation was with me - my Discord username isn't FaintlySorcerous.

    I will amend my statement: if one of Ma or Pa is under 34k XP, Noburi can summon one of them outright, as the cost would be under his 1500 CP cap even with triple-cost Summoning.

    I personally think this is pretty reasonable; a build that gives Hazo a single-cost 89 and a double-cost 70 costs 20k XP. You can add another 14k there and still be in Noburi's budget. I figure that's probably where Ma and Pa are, roughly, given XP fade with age and their approximate power level. We only need Summon one of them to verify the memory in front of an audience, and we don't even need to do that - the Conclave has Toads and they can pass the information to that Toad in code who can pass it to a Monkey or something.
     
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    eaglejarl said:
    Tiny tongues of lakewater lapped at the white-sand shore

    The sand compacted under the weight of a naked foot

    The man raced forward and leapt, white hair flaring around himself as he landed into a squat and dropped back onto his hands, kicking up with both legs. The tattered rags of Leaf battledress rustled around him

    "Jiraiya?"
    His arms did not support him; he tumbled gracelessly to the ground

    "Damnit, Jiraiya," he grumbled. "You know better than that. Do it again."

    "Jiraiya, it's me! Can you hear me?"
    "But sensei," he whined, his voice suddenly high and juvenile. "It's not faaaair! How am I supposed to do the Frog Smash with no chakra?"

    "Stop calling it that, you snotty tadpole!" he said, voice now sharply feminine. "It's the Toad Thrust, not the Frog Smash! And how come the old coot gets to be 'sensei' and I don't, huh?"

    "Jiraiya, we're coming! Just hold on! We're coming to get you and bring you back!"
    "Old coot? Don't you disrespect me, you old bat! Don't you... Don't you..."

    He frowned and sat back, shaking his head. "...you old bat? Don't you... Don't you... C'mon, c'mon... Ha! Don't you dare call me that, Little Miss!" His face lit up in delight at the memory. He leapt to his feet, cackling and capering. "Hah! Little Miss, Little Miss, Little Miss! And then she took the stick! I remember!" He thrust both fists at the uncaring grey sky. "I remember! I am Jiraiya of the Sannin! Student of Sarutobi Hiruzen, God of Shinobi! Battle-brother to Orochimaru of the Snakes and Tsunade of the Slugs! Born of no family, begrudged the Matron's roof, feared by braggarts and bullies! Master of the Frog Kata! Sage of the Toad Clan! Fifth Hokage and patriarch of Gōketsu! Husband of Mari, father of Keiko, Noburi, and Hazō! I am Jiraiya the Great, and you will not have me, because I remember!"
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    My observations:
    • He's on a white-sand lakeshore, nature of the lake unknown but knowing that it's a lake is a good start
    • The sky is grey
    • He appears to be alone, despite dying physically and temporally near a lot of trusted allies
    • He's out of chakra (fully expected if he's in the same place Daizen was) and physically weakened
      • Unknown whether it's malnutrition or a Path effect.
    • His clothes are in tatters. This could be from Kagome's Bliss, or it could be damage sustained in-Path. If so, possibly indicates he has avoided dying a second time? Need to check how Naraka handles clothes when respawning
    • It's unclear why he was racing and leaping. He may have been under pursuit (but he seemed unconcerned by falling down?), or this may have been something he does without prompting (to help reinvigorate his memory somehow? Just basic physical exercises?)
    • His memory is fading fast. It's only been a year or two and he's already starting to slip away at times. How long before he wouldn't recognize us if we were standing in front of him?
      • Granted, we don't know how long it took to degenerate to this state. Perhaps this is what it's like over there from day one and Jiraiya's only marginally worse
        • (Of course, we should still proceed at maximum possible speed)
    There are a few details we can probably cross-reference with the Daizen chapter, like the colour of the sky, but assuming this is accurate information it's a mixed bag. Narrowing down our primary search area to lakeshores is a great boon, but the lack of any company is evidence against the idea that spawning in Naraka follows a one-to-one mapping. Heading in the approximate direction of Nagi Island once we enter Naraka is probably still our best bet, but if the guys from Nagi Island didn't get dropped close to each other then Jiraiya could be quite a distance away. And we don't have much time.

    Once we go to O'Uzu and use Kagome's diagnostic seals, we should put everything we possibly can behind that next necromantic step, all the way until we get the rift open. Once that happens, I have plans.
     
    FaintlySorcerous said:
    • Have Noburi go meet Ma and Pa. Have him relay the memory. If it's valid, have him contract with them for a one-time Summon so they can tell Naruto, Asuma, and anyone else Asuma thinks appropriate about this.
    • Comply with any and all efforts to verify that Hazo isn't faking. If the Yamanaka have lie-detecting jutsu, no matter how invasive, submit to them.
    • Attempt the same procedure with Tsunade as soon as is viable. Demand the strictest possible opsec.
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    Okay, I think this is potentially going a bit too fast. Lets seriously think about this and mull over potential issues before the velocity of Shikaku's Ghost's facepalm creates nuclear fusion in the afterlife dimension.
     
    MMKII said:
    Okay, I think this is potentially going a bit too fast. Lets seriously think about this and mull over potential issues before the velocity of Shikaku's Ghost's facepalm creates nuclear fusion in the afterlife dimension.
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    The only thing here that I think might be too fast is talking to Tsunade. Not talking to Asuma about this seems like it might be teetering on the edge of treason.

    What outcomes are you concerned with? Every circumstance where we shouldn't tell Asuma ASAP sums to 'we need to go missing again' in my mind, and that's not viable.
     
    FaintlySorcerous said:
    What outcomes are you concerned with?
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    I don't necessarily want:

    - A conversation where we broach this topic with powerful individuals who are emotionally invested in it without some more in-detail workshopping it, because *that* is something I can see Hazou pilot fucking up if we dont double check things and iron down some details (and make sure the evidence is conclusive).
    - The outcome of a conversation like that to necessarily be "All hands on deck for Leaf's Necromancy Research Division."
    - Us to begin moving billiards on this table in a manner where we can't predict the outcome, when it comes to an issue this sensitive.

    What I do want:

    - I want us to try (as a playerbase) to attempt to model in-depth most of Leaf's major powers' opinions, reactions, and actions taken as a result of acquiring this knowledge.
    - I want to identify grey areas where we are unsure about something, and further take action in character to alleviate that uncertainty.
    - I want us to hold off on doing things for the time being and think about things in general, because this one could be Important.

    Why I want these things:

    Quite frankly, there are too many suspected unknown unknowns on the table, and I don't want this to be the case where we show our hand and this ends up causing massive problems for us down the line. Having independently verifiable and convincing proof of some sort of Afterlife Dimension existing is actually an infohazard. That is dangerous information to have in this setting. We are generally very keen on sharing a lot of inventions and advantages, and this has happened to turn out quite well for us so far, but I do believe there are times where it actually might matter whether we stop and think for a while about deciding to do things, even if the first response is "Yeah, this should be okay, right?"

    In terms of actual concrete things I can state, I am more than mildly concerned that us distributing this information will naturally result in it cycling to Good 'Ol Uncle Oro. I do not currently know what Orochimaru would do(in the short, mid, or long term) if he found that there might be other methods of ressurection-tech or immortality-tech available, and I would like very much to actively try to get the answer to that question or at least get some in character speculation (or even have a one-on-one with Asuma alone, discussing these very concerns that hey, maybe if we let the mad scientist immortality obsessed unkillable snake guy know about some new immortality stuff, then he might start behaving in ways that make him hard to predict or to control -- that might be a very relevant problem both for us and for Asuma, I wager, given past conversations on the Orochimaru Problem) before we accidentally let the cat out of the bag. The cat is inside the bag until we have Hazou (or Noburi, in all likelihood) go talk to Ma and Pa and verify that either this was an accurate retelling of some training they did with Jiraiya, or it wasn't.

    Now, I am not saying we should not talk to Asuma. I think he is a very reasonable and understanding guy, if somewhat emotionally compromised and not entirely aligned with Uplift per se, and he will understand that this is a Big Thing ™️, and that we maybe thought we had to tread carefully to bring it to his attention, but nevertheless, we will bring it to his attention at the end of the day, and that matters quite a lot IMO.
     
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