Not going to lie... I'd forgotten about that. I remembered that Dogs, as a species, seem to find being a foreign ambassador distasteful (pack species), but I'd forgotten that the Dogs were hosting other Ambassadors.
By the time it comes up, I think that ship will have sailed.
That said, I trust Kabuto and Mari to have this coordinated. They're both invested in making sure that Orochimaru doesn't lash out at anyone, and the easiest way to do that is to make sure he stays relatively happy.
Not going to lie... I'd forgotten about that. I remembered that Dogs, as a species, seem to find being a foreign ambassador distasteful (pack species), but I'd forgotten that the Dogs were hosting other Ambassadors.
Tbh it's why Cannai is so unwilling to send Dog ambassadors to Toad. He already gets all the benefits of the Summon Trade Network without having to send an ambassador. If Pandaa left he would probably reconsider.
Tbh it's why Cannai is so unwilling to send Dog ambassadors to Toad. He already gets all the benefits of the Summon Trade Network without having to send an ambassador. If Pandaa left he would probably reconsider.
Cannai has also said that Dogs would find the thought of being away from their pack, indefinitely, horrible. Their pack animals, after all. And sending 2-3 would only mitigate the issue...
Actually, I wonder how the Dogs in Arachnid are holding up? They're facing this very issue, AND they've lost one of their own in this strange land.
And what do we do if Orochimaru says "no?" What if he says "I'm not leaving. What are you going to do, make me? Go ahead, I'll kill you with my offhand pinky and go back to my research in less than 5seconds. You'll refuse to trade with me? I'll just take what I want. You'll stop me? See the previous response."
Worse, what if Orochimaru says "alright, bye?" Orochimaru is one third of Leaf's major military power. What happens when he just packs his shit up and leaves? Leaf has very few jonin left. Leaf is crippled. If Orochimaru leaves, then Rock might very well take the AMITY hit to wipe out Leaf. Or they may do a kamikaze rush to try and annihilate Leaf before AMITY finds out.
And if Leaf is wiped out, then Rock (who has the benefit of still existing) can just pay off AMITY. After all. Leaf is dead and gone, whereas Rock is still existing. Rock can still be useful. Rock pays some fines, makes some concessions, and enjoys the knowledge that they've killed an enemy who spent the time that AMITY was being founded wrecking their infrastructure and slaughtering civilians, rather than trying to "win the war"
Orochimaru stays or Orochimaru leaves, either way, Leaf loses.
And what do we do if Orochimaru says "no?" What if he says "I'm not leaving. What are you going to do, make me? Go ahead, I'll kill you with my offhand pinky and go back to my research in less than 5seconds. You'll refuse to trade with me? I'll just take what I want. You'll stop me? See the previous response."
That's not the line at all. The way we get rid of Oro is by convincing Asuma that now is the time to deal with him. And he can send in Tsunade and Naruto to kill/exile him. We aren't involved at all and Ideally we wouldn't even talk to Asuma about it but manipulate third parties to convince Asuma.
I'm not advocating this but there is a pretty reasonable path to getting rid of Oro. You also could be right about the fall out which makes it a bad but that does nothing to close off the line
Cannai has also said that Dogs would find the thought of being away from their pack, indefinitely, horrible. Their pack animals, after all. And sending 2-3 would only mitigate the issue...
Actually, I wonder how the Dogs in Arachnid are holding up? They're facing this very issue, AND they've lost one of their own in this strange land.
Cannai doesn't want to do it without it bringing sufficient benefits to Dog. An embassy in Toad would bring a lot benefit to Leaf, but not the Dog Clan as long as Pandaa is there. After all, if the gain is sufficient he's perfectly willing to send his pack members to their deaths. A couple years of isolation is surely less severe than that. I think he would probably send an ambassador, or possibly a small pack, if that wasn't an option.
Cannai doesn't want to do it without it bringing sufficient benefits to Dog. An embassy in Toad would bring a lot benefit to Leaf, but not the Dog Clan as long as Pandaa is there. After all, if the gain is sufficient he's perfectly willing to send his pack members to their deaths. A couple years of isolation is surely less severe than that. I think he would probably send an ambassador, or possibly a small pack, if that wasn't an option.
I mean it seemed like we made some decent progress finding an ambassador behind Cannai's back, which we didn't realize we were doing and which he wasn't happy about. Getting a handful of dogs to chill there for a year and then swap out the ambassadors annually seems pretty doable
I mean it seemed like we made some decent progress finding an ambassador behind Cannai's back, which we didn't realize we were doing and which he wasn't happy about. Getting a handful of dogs to chill there for a year and then swap out the ambassadors annually seems pretty doable
I agree! I would think that we could find a couple of curious younger Dogs that wouldn't mind serving as the ambassador for a year and then rotating out. Cannai felt much more strongly about that than I was expecting. That well is probably poisoned for a good, long time.
I agree! I would think that we could find a couple of curious younger Dogs that wouldn't mind serving as the ambassador for a year and then rotating out. Cannai felt much more strongly about that than I was expecting. That well is probably poisoned for a good, long time.
That's not the line at all. The way we get rid of Oro is by convincing Asuma that now is the time to deal with him. And he can send in Tsunade and Naruto to kill/exile him. We aren't involved at all and Ideally we wouldn't even talk to Asuma about it but manipulate third parties to convince Asuma.
I'm not advocating this but there is a pretty reasonable path to getting rid of Oro. You also could be right about the fall out which makes it a bad but that does nothing to close off the line
Asuma: "Prepare the killbox, my treasony sense is tingling"
It'd be a waste to kill Oro, can't we make him see the light? By Tsukuyomi, lobotomy, chakra tapeworm, lunchpanzen and/or *shudder* 4th's poetry. Couldn't find a more deserving victim.
I was initially joking, but would a chakra drain be feasible as was done with that one yakuza murderer clansman whose name I forgot?
Also just realized orochimaru, being part snake, is a chimera. Nominative determinism FTW.
Hazō, Calligraphy (32) + 4 (2 days prep) + 3 (dice): 39. Success!
Hazō, Sealing (51) + 4 (2 days prep) + 6 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student") + 6 (invoke "Kagome-certified Sealing Lab") + ? (Kagome's AB from his invoke) + 0 (dice): 67 + ? Success! MARS is complete
Time for some showing off!
Hazō, Deceit (24 x 1 for Sleight of Hand stunt) + 136 (tag "the author finds it funny and this isn't a plot-critical scene so eh to simultanionism") - 3 (CM penalty, applied retroactively, "the author would prefer that this roll come out to an even number but doesn't want to change the dice roll because that's dishonest and unsimulationist") + 3 (dice) = 150
Kagome, Alertness (spot the sleight of hand): ? + 0 (dice) = ?
Kagome fails! In the bad old days this would have been a C-class failure, but thankfully we aren't using fractional exponents anymore. (New readers or those who read Story-Only can drop over to the main thread or the #mfd channel on the Discord to ask what this means.)
"Hah!" Hazō said, jumping to his feet.
"What?!" Kagome-sensei said, instantaneously going from snoozing comfortably against a tree to on his feet and waving his blast-ring-equipped hands in all directions. "I'm awake! I mean I was awake! I've been awake this whole time!"
"It's fine, sensei," Hazō said, waving the older man back to the grass as he sat down himself. "I figured it out, that's all. There was a transient connection that I'd been missing. The moment I snipped it off, the whole thing clicked." He proudly held up the very first successful instance of the Multiple Activation Relay Seal, which he had decided to call MARS for short. The rest of the family had asked him what 'MARS' meant and Hazō had shrugged, saying that it was a pronounceable acronym and that was good enough.
"Huh," Kagome-sensei said, studying the seal curiously. "Show me."
Hazō gestured theatrically with the MARS seal in his right hand, bringing it up and to the side in a wide gesture that drew the eyes.
"We'll need something to pair it with," he said dramatically. He looked up and forward, head and eyes following the course of an invisible fly buzzing a foot in front of him and two feet up. After a moment he thrust his left hand forward and plucked an explosive tag from 'thin air'. (Well, he flipped the tag he'd been palming into an extended and showy two-finger grip.) Simultaneously, his right hand dropped back to his side, tugging another folded-up explosive seal out from where it was wedged behind his belt.
"Wow!" Kagome-sensei said, eyes going wide in child-like delight. "You didn't use any handseals or call the name of the technique or anything!"
"Of course, this is the Multiple Activation Relay Seal," Hazō said smoothly. He transferred the MARS seal to his left hand and with his right hand he 'plucked from thin air' the second explosive. Kagome-sensei applauded.
Prestidigitation over, Hazō pressed the MARS seal to one of the explosives and sent a miniscule pulse of chakra into it. He repeated the act with the other seal, then tossed them well away in different directions.
"Sensei, would you care to do the honors?" Hazō asked, offering the MARS seal to his teacher.
Kagome-sensei looked dubious about it, but he reached out one finger and triggered the MARS. An instant later, the two explosives went off, one after the other but so close together than only trained ears such as those of anyone on Team Uplift could have spotted the difference.
Kagome-sensei's eyes went wide and gleeful. "How many can they do?" he asked.
"MARS is single use," Hazō said with a grimace, "and they only pair with at most two other seals, but you can chain them. Have one MARS activate a seal—"
"Like an explosive?"
"Or a Strobe Light seal to blind your opponent, or—"
"Or an explosive?" Kagome-sensei said, his voice becoming plaintive.
"Or a macerator loaded with pangolin pepper dust so that they're too busy screaming at the pain in their eyes and nose to do anything. Or—"
"An explosive?" The words were pleading.
"Yes, or an explosive. And it can also simultaneously activate another MARS which does the same and you can chain together as many as you like. Anyway, I'm going to make some load-outs for all of us and then tomorrow we can get on the road. Want to help?"
Kagome-sensei's eyes twinkled with glee as he reached for his brush.
o-o-o-o
"Ha!" Hazō said, putting his hands on his hips and looking around in satisfaction.
"What?" Akane asked, pacing around a bit to cool down after today's segment of their multi-day run.
It was five minutes past noon and one minute since the team had arrived at the site of the O'Uzu Island rift scar. The granite tube, no longer gushing lava, was where they had left it. The puddled lava flows were black and warmed only by the modest April sun that was currently playing peek-a-boo with the clouds. The granite box where the hell plants from the first rift was still there and apparently unopened. The other granite box, the one where Hazō had created to shelter an unconscious Daizen after rescuing the cultist from totally-the-afterlife-no-matter-what-anyone-else-says. The tunnel that Daizen had dug to escape from the shelter had slumped in and there were signs that something was now using the box as a lair. Fortunately, the space wasn't that big so it was unlikely to be something terribly dangerous. Still, it would probably make sense to throw an ex— Oh.
BOOM!
"I got it!" Kagome-sensei said, waving from beside the box, a beatific grin on his face. "Something was lairing in there so I threw an explosive in! All clear now."
"Thank you, Kagome. I don't know what we'd do without you," Akane said, amused. Her self-loathing was...not healing, exactly, but at least scabbing over. There were now entire hours where she was her old self! Granted, that was 'hours across the course of a week', but it was still progress. This morning had been a few of the good hours, and now she was prowling the perimeter of the area where Hazō and Kagome would be working, searching for any possible threats so that the sealmasters could focus.
"Shall I set up camp?" Yuno asked quietly. Her eyes were moving steadily and Satsuko was in her hand instead of slung across her chest where the axe resided when running cross-country.
"Thanks," Hazō said. "Be sure to give us plenty of room. Two hundred yards minimum, since we'll likely need to do some research while we're here. And it can be a little more elaborate than our traveling camps—I think we passed a small waterfall on the way in? If you can site it near there we could set up the hot tub. It'll need a little elbow grease, but we can make it work."
She frowned. "I'm not sure I want grease in my hot tub. Is this a Leaf thing?"
"Sorry," Hazō said. "It's an idiom. It means a little bit of hard work. Gathering enough fuel for a big enough fire to heat the water, that kind of thing."
"Oh." Her face shut down in exactly the way it always did when she was reminded that she was the outsider who needed simple things explained. "Yes, of course." She turned and jogged back the way they'd come.
Hazō winced and then sighed. He shook his head, then moved to do the preliminary prep of the area that would have to happen before any actual work could be done. It was tedious work and brain-rippingly frustrating to have to wait, but it was still important.
o-o-o-o
The area was cleaned, cleared, and determined to be relatively free of threats. Kagome-sensei had taken weather records and cast runes. He had experimented with infusing storage seals in various spots around the clearing, paying close attention in order to spot the miniscule differences that the team had noticed on their previous visit. There had been three rifts here; if you ripped three holes in a piece of cloth, there tended to be fraying throughout the entire area. The expectation was that they should see tiny disruptions of infusion flows throughout the area.
Nope.
They went back through every detail of Hazō's fight with Daizen, to the best of Hazō's ability to recreate it. (Which was less perfect than he would have preferred, since there was now a giant granite tube where the fight had happened and he wasn't capable of accelerating himself in midair the way he had when the tube hit him in the belly.)
Nothing useful.
With the preliminaries over, it was time to focus on the main event. Hazō went over to the northeast corner of the box that entombed the plant horrors. He set his heels in the correct position and used the Iron Nerve to retrace his steps from their previous visit, ending with a series of marks on the ground to delineate precisely where the rift scar was. He pulled a set of wooden poles and twine out of a storage seal and replayed the act of setting up a tripod atop the marks, then marking the sides of the poles to show the precise vertical location.
Kagome-sensei had been watching and came hurrying over the moment Hazō finished. He produced one of his diagnostic seals—created specifically for this task—and walked a spiral around the tripod, starting a dozen yards away and coming inwards only slowly.
The diagnostic seal was an array of dots arranged across the surface of a series of overlapping spirals. The seal reacted to the currents of chakra in its surroundings, different dots emitting different colors and intensities of light in response. Kagome-sensei had successfully used it to identify the location where various jutsu had recently been used and identify the element of the jutsu. He had also used it to distinguish between a rat corpse that had been dead for an hour and one that had been dead for a day, despite both corpses having been wrapped in linen so that Kagome couldn't distinguish between them visually.
The seal was beautiful, fascinating, and a miracle of seal research. It was also single-use, lasted only two or three minutes, had a range measured in finger-widths, and was so sensitive that any intentional use of chakra within a dozen yards would ruin it. (Out of curiosity, Hazō had tried using one near the Great Seal on the Seventh Path. The diagnostic seal promptly caught fire and exploded, attracting the attention of one of the Dragons and forcing Hazō to spend ten very tense minutes hiding until the monster lost interest in finding and eating him.)
"Hmmmm..." Kagome-sensei said, holding the latest of his diagnostic seals precisely where the invisible rift scar (presumably) hovered.
Hazō bounced impatiently. He'd had no chance to learn what the various signals of the seal meant and Kagome-sensei hated to be rushed.
"What did you say the destroyed seals were?" Kagome-sensei asked, finally looking up.
"An empty storage seal, a Banshee Slayer, one of the macerators that I had loaded with pangolin peppers, a misterator, a Purifier, an Earth Dome, one of your wide-angle blast seals and one of your force axes." There were times that it was very cool to have been born a Kurosawa; shortly after the event in question, Hazō had made a point of reviewing all his seals to find which ones had been destroyed, then saying the names aloud. All he had to do to remember what they were was have the Iron Nerve replay the action of speaking those words. He still needed to remember the general shape of the memory in order to find the correct actions for his bloodline to recreate, but once he did that much he could be certain that he had the list correct.
Kagome-sensei went back to studying his diagnostic seal, moving it around very slightly as he did. "Hmmmm."
Hazō managed to hold out for at least thirty seconds. "Well?!"
"Don't rush me!"
Hazō clamped his lips shut so that only a few strangled grumbles escaped.
Finally, finally, Kagome-sensei finished his initial examination. "There's something there."
Hazō waited for at least a second before bursting out, "AND?!"
Kagome-sensei gave him a sour look. "There's something there, it's emitting very slight amounts of chakra, and it's not moving, which means it's probably not some kind of bug too small to see. It doesn't have any elemental signature that I can detect, meaning that it's neutral chakra. Assuming that one of your seals failing is what caused it"—he raised a hand to cut Hazō off—"which, yes, is the most plausible explanation, that means it probably wasn't the Earth Dome or the Purifier. Those would have been earth or wind aspect respectively. I'm not detecting any of the ripples that I often see around active storage seals, but those aren't always detectable so don't rule anything out. Anyway, I'd tentatively give best odds to the failure having been one of my blast seals exploding the barrier between Paths." Given the severity of the event and his normal caution around seal failures, the older man seemed awfully smug about the (presumed) source of the rift.
"Okay," Hazō said. "What does that tell us?"
Kagome-sensei's eyes grew sly. "You've always said that the problem was you wanted to resurrect people. Sounds like explosives really are—"
"Aggh!" Hazō said, throwing his hands in the air. "Fine, I walked into that one. What does it tell us about how to re-open the rift?"
Kagome-sensei rubbed his jaw. "Well," he said slowly, "my blast seals are a modification on regular explosives. Regular explosions start at the center of the seal and go out in all directions. Mine..." He looked around to ensure that no one was nearby. Akane was well out of earshot, still checking the perimeter of the field and gathering firewood. Yuno was out of sight along their back trail.
"Mine are a combination of a storage seal and an explosive," Kagome-sensei whispered. "When the blast goes off, it opens a very tiny storage space around the point of the blast, swallowing whatever part I don't want to emit. It's only there for an instant, just long enough to swallow a section of the explosion and shut itself down, and it's so small that you couldn't put anything physical in it. Not even a grain of rice. But..."
Hazō nodded thoughtfully. "But, any storage seal is a tradeoff between capacity, opening speed, and safety, so—"
"What?! That's not true and you know it! It's not just capacity, opening speed, and safety, you gormless hobgoblin! There's also ejection speed, storage shear, fourth-chord stress—"
Hazō raised his hands in surrender. "Okay, okay, you're right. I was too casual with that. Still, under most cases a storage seal is perfectly safe to destroy as long as there's space for it to eject its contents, meaning that it's weird to think the storage effect would be the issue. The only time you see a failure would be under some very unlikely combination of events, like—"
Kagome-sensei's eyes widened. "—if there's an anabatic turbulence on the aetheric wind at that location and the moon is in the third quarter while the Lovers are below the horizon then the storage seal—"
Hazō nodded furiously as he caught his teacher's point. "—become convex, with the degree being dependent on—"
"—the ambient chakra levels, potentially even causing—"
"—an inversion! Which, if your blast seals involve a storage effect, means that something like the rift could theoretically be caused by the destruction of one of them in a high-chakra environment—"
"—which that lightning jutsu would have been! Lightning jutsu throw chakra everywhere—that's why they're so chakra-intensive! The whole place would have been saturated with lightning-aspect chakra which could have supercharged the storage effect—"
"—which has no elemental aspect itself, which is why there isn't any in the rift!" Hazō ran out of words and simply rode the waves of shock until he could get his brain working again.
"Sensei," he said at last, "am I crazy, or does it sound like one of your blast seals turned itself inside out? The lightning jutsu damaged the seal, causing it to activate but damaging the matrix so that it couldn't function properly. The energy that would have been the explosion turned inwards and, between that and the ambient chakra from the lightning jutsu, it caused a complete inversion, which caused the miniscule volume to inflate into a larger volume. That portal was a storage space, with one transshift canal here on the Human Path and the other on the Naraka Path."
Kagome-sensei nodded. "It would make sense. Doesn't mean it's right, but it's the obvious answer and the first thing to investigate." He rubbed his neck. "No idea how we could possibly reproduce it. It would have depended on the aetheric weather on this spot at that moment, as well as the star positions in effect. I don't suppose you took a sky reading afterwards, did you?"
"Sorry, Sensei," Hazō said, blushing. "I didn't think of it. And I'm not sure Hidan would have let me take the time even if I had."
"Hrmph. Well, can't be helped. Don't know that I'd want to try deliberately recreating the circumstances of a seal failure even if you did have the data." He studied the empty air where the rift scar floated. "We'll have to focus on opening this thing instead."
"Right! So, how about..."
Akane glanced over; Hazō and his teacher were facing each other and leaning forward, both sets of eyes wide and hands gesticulating wildly as the thoughts spilled out. She couldn't hear what they were saying from here, but at least they seemed excited. That was either a very good thing or a world-ending calamity.
Author's Note: Ugh. This obviously took way longer to write than I would have preferred. Today has been a low-focus day. Sorry for that.
This update covered 8 days: 2 days of seal research prep, 1 day of seal research, 1 day of making MARS load-outs for the family, and 4 days of traveling to O'uzu.
Kagome's diagnostic seals have given up the information that they have and nothing that either he or Hazō has come up with has yielded more information. Following up on the new theories is going to require seal research; Kagome is already preparing a facility.
Hazō, Calligraphy (32) + 4 (2 days prep) + 3 (dice): 39. Success!
Hazō, Sealing (51) + 4 (2 days prep) + 6 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student") + 6 (invoke "Kagome-certified Sealing Lab") + ? (Kagome's AB from his invoke) + 0 (dice): 67 + ? Success! MARS is complete
Time for some showing off!
Hazō, Deceit (24 x 1 for Sleight of Hand stunt) + 136 (tag "the author finds it funny and this isn't a plot-critical scene so eh to simultanionism") - 3 (CM penalty, applied retroactively, "the author would prefer that this roll come out to an even number but doesn't want to change the dice roll because that's dishonest and unsimulationist") + 3 (dice) = 150
Kagome, Alertness (spot the sleight of hand): ? + 0 (dice) = ?
Kagome fails! In the bad old days this would have been a C-class failure, but thankfully we aren't using fractional exponents anymore. (New readers or those who read Story-Only can drop over to the main thread or the #mfd channel on the Discord to ask what this means.)
"Hah!" Hazō said, jumping to his feet.
"What?!" Kagome-sensei said, instantaneously going from snoozing comfortably against a tree to on his feet and waving his blast-ring-equipped hands in all directions. "I'm awake! I mean I was awake! I've been awake this whole time!"
"It's fine, sensei," Hazō said, waving the older man back to the grass as he sat down himself. "I figured it out, that's all. There was a transient connection that I'd been missing. The moment I snipped it off, the whole thing clicked." He proudly held up the very first successful instance of the Multiple Activation Relay Seal, which he had decided to call MARS for short. The rest of the family had asked him what 'MARS' meant and Hazō had shrugged, saying that it was a pronounceable acronym and that was good enough.
"Huh," Kagome-sensei said, studying the seal curiously. "Show me."
Hazō gestured theatrically with the MARS seal in his right hand, bringing it up and to the side in a wide gesture that drew the eyes.
"We'll need something to pair it with," he said dramatically. He looked up and forward, head and eyes following the course of an invisible fly buzzing a foot in front of him and two feet up. After a moment he thrust his left hand forward and plucked an explosive tag from 'thin air'. (Well, he flipped the tag he'd been palming into an extended and showy two-finger grip.) Simultaneously, his right hand dropped back to his side, tugging another folded-up explosive seal out from where it was wedged behind his belt.
"Wow!" Kagome-sensei said, eyes going wide in child-like delight. "You didn't use any handseals or call the name of the technique or anything!"
"Of course, this is the Multiple Activation Relay Seal," Hazō said smoothly. He transferred the MARS seal to his left hand and with his right hand he 'plucked from thin air' the second explosive. Kagome-sensei applauded.
Prestidigitation over, Hazō pressed the MARS seal to one of the explosives and sent a miniscule pulse of chakra into it. He repeated the act with the other seal, then tossed them well away in different directions.
"Sensei, would you care to do the honors?" Hazō asked, offering the MARS seal to his teacher.
Kagome-sensei looked dubious about it, but he reached out one finger and triggered the MARS. An instant later, the two explosives went off, one after the other but so close together than only trained ears such as those of anyone on Team Uplift could have spotted the difference.
Kagome-sensei's eyes went wide and gleeful. "How many can they do?" he asked.
"MARS is single use," Hazō said with a grimace, "and they only pair with at most two other seals, but you can chain them. Have one MARS activate a seal—"
"Like an explosive?"
"Or a Strobe Light seal to blind your opponent, or—"
"Or an explosive?" Kagome-sensei said, his voice becoming plaintive.
"Or a macerator loaded with pangolin pepper dust so that they're too busy screaming at the pain in their eyes and nose to do anything. Or—"
"An explosive?" The words were pleading.
"Yes, or an explosive. And it can also simultaneously activate another MARS which does the same and you can chain together as many as you like. Anyway, I'm going to make some load-outs for all of us and then tomorrow we can get on the road. Want to help?"
Kagome-sensei's eyes twinkled with glee as he reached for his brush.
o-o-o-o
"Ha!" Hazō said, putting his hands on his hips and looking around in satisfaction.
"What?" Akane asked, pacing around a bit to cool down after today's segment of their multi-day run.
It was five minutes past noon and one minute since the team had arrived at the site of the O'Uzu Island rift scar. The granite tube, no longer gushing lava, was where they had left it. The puddled lava flows were black and warmed only by the modest April sun that was currently playing peek-a-boo with the clouds. The granite box where the hell plants from the first rift was still there and apparently unopened. The other granite box, the one where Hazō had created to shelter an unconscious Daizen after rescuing the cultist from totally-the-afterlife-no-matter-what-anyone-else-says. The tunnel that Daizen had dug to escape from the shelter had slumped in and there were signs that something was now using the box as a lair. Fortunately, the space wasn't that big so it was unlikely to be something terribly dangerous. Still, it would probably make sense to throw an ex— Oh.
BOOM!
"I got it!" Kagome-sensei said, waving from beside the box, a beatific grin on his face. "Something was lairing in there so I threw an explosive in! All clear now."
"Thank you, Kagome. I don't know what we'd do without you," Akane said, amused. Her self-loathing was...not healing, exactly, but at least scabbing over. There were now entire hours where she was her old self! Granted, that was 'hours across the course of a week', but it was still progress. This morning had been a few of the good hours, and now she was prowling the perimeter of the area where Hazō and Kagome would be working, searching for any possible threats so that the sealmasters could focus.
"Shall I set up camp?" Yuno asked quietly. Her eyes were moving steadily and Satsuko was in her hand instead of slung across her chest where the axe resided when running cross-country.
"Thanks," Hazō said. "Be sure to give us plenty of room. Two hundred yards minimum, since we'll likely need to do some research while we're here. And it can be a little more elaborate than our traveling camps—I think we passed a small waterfall on the way in? If you can site it near there we could set up the hot tub. It'll need a little elbow grease, but we can make it work."
She frowned. "I'm not sure I want grease in my hot tub. Is this a Leaf thing?"
"Sorry," Hazō said. "It's an idiom. It means a little bit of hard work. Gathering enough fuel for a big enough fire to heat the water, that kind of thing."
"Oh." Her face shut down in exactly the way it always did when she was reminded that she was the outsider who needed simple things explained. "Yes, of course." She turned and jogged back the way they'd come.
Hazō winced and then sighed. He shook his head, then moved to do the preliminary prep of the area that would have to happen before any actual work could be done. It was tedious work and brain-rippingly frustrating to have to wait, but it was still important.
o-o-o-o
The area was cleaned, cleared, and determined to be relatively free of threats. Kagome-sensei had taken weather records and cast runes. He had experimented with infusing storage seals in various spots around the clearing, paying close attention in order to spot the miniscule differences that the team had noticed on their previous visit. There had been three rifts here; if you ripped three holes in a piece of cloth, there tended to be fraying throughout the entire area. The expectation was that they should see tiny disruptions of infusion flows throughout the area.
Nope.
They went back through every detail of Hazō's fight with Daizen, to the best of Hazō's ability to recreate it. (Which was less perfect than he would have preferred, since there was now a giant granite tube where the fight had happened and he wasn't capable of accelerating himself in midair the way he had when the tube hit him in the belly.)
Nothing useful.
With the preliminaries over, it was time to focus on the main event. Hazō went over to the northeast corner of the box that entombed the plant horrors. He set his heels in the correct position and used the Iron Nerve to retrace his steps from their previous visit, ending with a series of marks on the ground to delineate precisely where the rift scar was. He pulled a set of wooden poles and twine out of a storage seal and replayed the act of setting up a tripod atop the marks, then marking the sides of the poles to show the precise vertical location.
Kagome-sensei had been watching and came hurrying over the moment Hazō finished. He produced one of his diagnostic seals—created specifically for this task—and walked a spiral around the tripod, starting a dozen yards away and coming inwards only slowly.
The diagnostic seal was an array of dots arranged across the surface of a series of overlapping spirals. The seal reacted to the currents of chakra in its surroundings, different dots emitting different colors and intensities of light in response. Kagome-sensei had successfully used it to identify the location where various jutsu had recently been used and identify the element of the jutsu. He had also used it to distinguish between a rat corpse that had been dead for an hour and one that had been dead for a day, despite both corpses having been wrapped in linen so that Kagome couldn't distinguish between them visually.
The seal was beautiful, fascinating, and a miracle of seal research. It was also single-use, lasted only two or three minutes, had a range measured in finger-widths, and was so sensitive that any intentional use of chakra within a dozen yards would ruin it. (Out of curiosity, Hazō had tried using one near the Great Seal on the Seventh Path. The diagnostic seal promptly caught fire and exploded, attracting the attention of one of the Dragons and forcing Hazō to spend ten very tense minutes hiding until the monster lost interest in finding and eating him.)
"Hmmmm..." Kagome-sensei said, holding the latest of his diagnostic seals precisely where the invisible rift scar (presumably) hovered.
Hazō bounced impatiently. He'd had no chance to learn what the various signals of the seal meant and Kagome-sensei hated to be rushed.
"What did you say the destroyed seals were?" Kagome-sensei asked, finally looking up.
"An empty storage seal, a Banshee Slayer, one of the macerators that I had loaded with pangolin peppers, a misterator, a Purifier, an Earth Dome, one of your wide-angle blast seals and one of your force axes." There were times that it was very cool to have been born a Kurosawa; shortly after the event in question, Hazō had made a point of reviewing all his seals to find which ones had been destroyed, then saying the names aloud. All he had to do to remember what they were was have the Iron Nerve replay the action of speaking those words. He still needed to remember the general shape of the memory in order to find the correct actions for his bloodline to recreate, but once he did that much he could be certain that he had the list correct.
Kagome-sensei went back to studying his diagnostic seal, moving it around very slightly as he did. "Hmmmm."
Hazō managed to hold out for at least thirty seconds. "Well?!"
"Don't rush me!"
Hazō clamped his lips shut so that only a few strangled grumbles escaped.
Finally, finally, Kagome-sensei finished his initial examination. "There's something there."
Hazō waited for at least a second before bursting out, "AND?!"
Kagome-sensei gave him a sour look. "There's something there, it's emitting very slight amounts of chakra, and it's not moving, which means it's probably not some kind of bug too small to see. It doesn't have any elemental signature that I can detect, meaning that it's neutral chakra. Assuming that one of your seals failing is what caused it"—he raised a hand to cut Hazō off—"which, yes, is the most plausible explanation, that means it probably wasn't the Earth Dome or the Purifier. Those would have been earth or wind aspect respectively. I'm not detecting any of the ripples that I often see around active storage seals, but those aren't always detectable so don't rule anything out. Anyway, I'd tentatively give best odds to the failure having been one of my blast seals exploding the barrier between Paths." Given the severity of the event and his normal caution around seal failures, the older man seemed awfully smug about the (presumed) source of the rift.
"Okay," Hazō said. "What does that tell us?"
Kagome-sensei's eyes grew sly. "You've always said that the problem was you wanted to resurrect people. Sounds like explosives really are–"
"Aggh!" Hazō said, throwing his hands in the air. "Fine, I walked into that one. What does it tell us about how to re-open the rift?"
Kagome-sensei rubbed his jaw. "Well," he said slowly, "my blast seals are a modification on regular explosives. Regular explosions start at the center of the seal and go out in all directions. Mine..." He looked around to ensure that no one was nearby. Akane was well out of earshot, still checking the perimeter of the field and gathering firewood. Yuno was out of sight along their back trail.
"Mine are a combination of a storage seal and an explosive," Kagome-sensei whispered. "When the blast goes off, it opens a very tiny storage space around the point of the blast, swallowing whatever part I don't want to emit. It's only there for an instant, just long enough to swallow a section of the explosion and shut itself down, and it's so small that you couldn't put anything physical in it. Not even a grain of rice. But..."
Hazō nodded thoughtfully. "But, any storage seal is a tradeoff between capacity, opening speed, and safety, so—"
"What?! That's not true and you know it! It's not just capacity, opening speed, and safety, you gormless hobgoblin! There's also ejection speed, storage shear, fourth-chord stress—"
Hazō raised his hands in surrender. "Okay, okay, you're right. I was too casual with that. Still, under most cases a storage seal is perfectly safe to destroy as long as there's space for it to eject its contents, meaning that it's weird to think the storage effect would be the issue. The only time you see a failure would be under some very unlikely combination of events, like—"
Kagome-sensei's eyes widened. "—if there's an anabatic turbulence on the aetheric wind at that location and the moon is in the third quarter while the Lovers are below the horizon then the storage seal—"
Hazō nodded furiously as he caught his teacher's point. "—become convex, with the degree being dependent on—"
"—the ambient chakra levels, potentially even causing—"
"—an inversion! Which, if your blast seals involve a storage effect, means that something like the rift could theoretically be caused by the destruction of one of them in a high-chakra environment—"
"—which that lightning jutsu would have been! Lightning jutsu throw chakra everywhere—that's why they're so chakra-intensive! The whole place would have been saturated with lightning-aspect chakra which could have supercharged the storage effect—"
"—which has no elemental aspect itself, which is why there isn't any in the rift!" Hazō ran out of words and simply rode the waves of shock until he could get his brain working again.
"Sensei," he said at last, "am I crazy, or does it sound like one of your blast seals turned itself inside out? The lightning jutsu damaged the seal, causing it to activate but damaging the matrix so that it couldn't function properly. The energy that would have been the explosion turned inwards and, between that and the ambient chakra from the lightning jutsu, it caused a complete inversion, which caused the miniscule volume to inflate into a larger volume. That portal was a storage space, with one transshift canal here on the Human Path and the other on the Naraka Path."
Kagome-sensei nodded. "It would make sense. Doesn't mean it's right, but it's the obvious answer and the first thing to investigate." He rubbed his neck. "No idea how we could possibly reproduce it. It would have depended on the aetheric weather on this spot at that moment, as well as the star positions in effect. I don't suppose you took a sky reading afterwards, did you?"
"Sorry, Sensei," Hazō said, blushing. "I didn't think of it. And I'm not sure Hidan would have let me take the time even if I had."
"Hrmph. Well, can't be helped. Don't know that I'd want to try deliberately recreating the circumstances of a seal failure even if you did have the data." He studied the empty air where the rift scar floated. "We'll have to focus on opening this thing instead."
"Right! So, how about..."
Akane glanced over; Hazō and his teacher were facing each other and leaning forward, both sets of eyes wide and hands gesticulating wildly as the thoughts spilled out. She couldn't hear what they were saying from here, but at least they seemed excited. That was either a very good thing or a world-ending calamity.
Author's Note: Ugh. This obviously took way longer to write than I would have preferred. Today has been a low-focus day. Sorry for that.
This update covered 8 days: 2 days of seal research prep, 1 day of seal research, 1 day of making MARS load-outs for the family, and 4 days of traveling to O'uzu.
Kagome's diagnostic seals have given up the information that they have and nothing that either he or Hazō has come up with has yielded more information. Following up on the new theories is going to require seal research; Kagome is already preparing a facility.
Oh joyous day, there's a direction for them to research! Progress, glorious progress! What a wonderful session of Hazo and Kagome riffing off of each other.
I think this chapter should be 521. I'm going to assume that the Hazo and Akane were able to FOOM the first four days, but not the later four, and that Kei is able to FOOM the entire eight days. Akane also needs to have her Resolve updated to 62, and all need to have the Ch. 520 FOOM XP added.
FOOM XP for Chapter 521
Base XP: 20
Akane: 62 Resolve -> 1.9 * 20 = 38 FOOM XP
Hazo: 44 Resolve -> 1.3 * 20 = 26 FOOM XP
Kei: 60 Resolve -> 1.8 Reduced by 0.4 due to Snowflake -> 1.4 * 40 = 56 FOOM XP
Ooooooh. This should be fun. The Earth Dome and the Directional Explosives (Wide-Cone) both failed.
Checking intensity...42 and 98. Hm.
Checking type...[rolls]...oh my.
A Construct and 1d3 Extradimensional Rifts. [rolls] 3 of them. Wow. Okay, let's see...Oh, I know.
I could continue this fight, but I think a major seal failure is enough to call it a day, and is more fun than continuing. Okay, Daizen eats a face full of lava and dies. Hazō is rocking two Consequences and unintentionally won the fight, so he'll be picking up some Fate Points.
This is from the update where the rift was opened. So it looks like Kagome and Hazou have a good idea of how the rift was opened in the first place. The obvious thing is to let the sealmasters work now. I wonder if making an intentionally inverted directional explosive would be a good idea? Probably not.
"Oh." Her face shut down in exactly the way it always did when she was reminded that she was the outsider who needed simple things explained. "Yes, of course." She turned and jogged back the way they'd come.
Mood. It's like when you first begin to learn a new language, and you feel stifled and limited. You know the words to communicate your intent, but none of them are the ones you need. New culture, new language, and idioms/metaphors are nonsensical at the start.
Kagome-sensei nodded. "It would make sense. Doesn't mean it's right, but it's the obvious answer and the first thing to investigate." He rubbed his neck. "No idea how we could possibly reproduce it. It would have depended on the aetheric weather on this spot at that moment, as well as the star positions in effect. I don't suppose you took a sky reading afterwards, did you?"
Didn't Hazou record what stars he could remember? I seem to recall a Noburi Interlude (the one where Hazou brings up necromancy, Noburi talks about it being unnatural, and Hazou says something to the effect of "so is toilet paper, so go stuff it").
----
Also, further Necomancy Tests:
Dragon Bits. They're on Dog, right? We could bring them around the Rift to see if they cause any fluctuations or weakening of the veil. Dragons used to have the ability to jump between Paths, so maybe their fragments would have some sort of distortion effect?
"—which that lightning jutsu would have been! Lightning jutsu throw chakra everywhere—that's why they're so chakra-intensive! The whole place would have been saturated with lightning-aspect chakra which could have supercharged the storage effect—"
"—which has no elemental aspect itself, which is why there isn't any in the rift!" Hazō ran out of words and simply rode the waves of shock until he could get his brain working again.
"Sensei," he said at last, "am I crazy, or does it sound like one of your blast seals turned itself inside out? The lightning jutsu damaged the seal, causing it to activate but damaging the matrix so that it couldn't function properly. The energy that would have been the explosion turned inwards and, between that and the ambient chakra from the lightning jutsu, it caused a complete inversion, which caused the miniscule volume to inflate into a larger volume. That portal was a storage space, with one transshift canal here on the Human Path and the other on the Naraka Path."
Electrocution Seal: sends a surge of raiton energy (which works exactly like electricity except in cases where that would make the QMs lives difficult, at which point it works differently) into whatever they are attached to for some period of time. Touching the object is harmful but not lethal.
