- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
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
- Location
- Yes.
Maybe "would feeding the rift lightning chakra help reinflate it?" might be better in its specificity?
Wait, what's this about antimemes?
- Location
- Texas
The fact that Jiraiya is seemingly forgetting memories.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
I kinda figured MadScientist meant it like 'using Lightning chakra in the research project'. I'm not sure it'll amount to much when most of the research is beneath the layer of abstraction, but I like the idea of throwing a few ideas out there so it's not just 'roll some dice until the thing is done' from our perspective.
[X] Action Plan: Uncharted Waters
Go to Isan, ask them to teach us, be swiftly eaten by tapirs.
But for real, I like the plan.
[X] Action Plan: Uncharted Waters
- Location
- Europe
[X] Action Plan: Uncharted Waters
Bum bum bum.
When the scar is open, maybe there is something we can do from the other side to stabilize it or keep it cheaper to maintain. Good to keep tabs on Sasuke's availability if the project extends months.
This was aggressive. Uh. Mistook light for lightning the first read. But if Naruto knows lightning element and lightning charges up the rift he has chakra for days. Rasengan is unique. Could have special interactions with rift scars. Maybe it erases them?
When the scar is open, maybe there is something we can do from the other side to stabilize it or keep it cheaper to maintain. Good to keep tabs on Sasuke's availability if the project extends months.
Naruto's Wind in canon. He's pretty likely to be Wind in MfD.
Wind by birth. Other elements would have been bought with XP.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Jiraiya did leave him a pretty amazing lightning jutsu (the whip)
I have cracked
(the whip)
you were probably
saving
for FOOM detour
Forgive me
it was exhilarating
so swwwshh
and so bzzzzzrt
(the whip)
you were probably
saving
for FOOM detour
Forgive me
it was exhilarating
so swwwshh
and so bzzzzzrt
- Location
- Yes.
Eisenhelm
gran dutch of douchery
- Location
- Colombia
I would have never braced the cold on my own
We were just tools; or so they told us
but as the monster in the mist snapped at my heels
I couldn't help but tighten my grip
iron gives no comfort, but a whetstone is never amiss.
-- Gouketsu Haozu
We were just tools; or so they told us
but as the monster in the mist snapped at my heels
I couldn't help but tighten my grip
iron gives no comfort, but a whetstone is never amiss.
-- Gouketsu Haozu
- Pronouns
- They/Them
I don't want Naruto to hate us but I don't know how we could possibly get him to not hate us without it being seen as blatant manipulation
Also Naruto is already automatically suspicious of everything we do because he hates us. And also he has political training. GODDAMMIT. Anyway, either we continue to generally beam honest Hazou niceness his way (which doesn't seem to be working) or we should take a very careful, subtle approach from an angle of attack he won't see coming.CCNJ: I admit I'm frustrated with Naruto because losing Naruto's support meant we lost a lot of physical and political power, which hurts, and I don't appreciate that Naruto routinely threatens grievous bodily harm towards us. And generally frustrated that he still views us uncharitably despite us trying our best to deal with him fairly, involving him in Jiraiya stuff, and doing more Will-of-Fire-aligned stuff than the clans. Thus my suggestions are less ethical than usual and I may be missing obvious solutions that require more empathy to see until I can understand his POV better.
First, we could utilize good ol' peer pressure. Naruto doesn't trust us but thankfully he trusts the other Gouketsu and also his peers. Continue to make nice with them so they see us in a good light. Figure out who else Naruto likes hanging out with and go hang out with them for some plausible reason. Then Naruto is peer pressured into viewing us positively? This is the most indirect method I can think of that won't risk tripping his social alarm bells.
Anyway, that method might be too slow, so here's another possible way to accelerate any gains we have and speedrun our way to friendship (warning: highly unethical): we exploit Naruto's penchant to use shadow clones on any occasion to cause shadow clone-induced personality drift. Get Naruto to work with Hazou on something that would plausibly require shadow clones, let him make all the shadow clones, make sure their experience with Hazou is positive, wait for Prime to dispel all the shadow clones, and bam 30x the increment of good feelings towards Hazou! The thing to work on would probably be an Asuma-approved Till-n-Fill Tour that Hazou plays a large part in leading so Naruto has to create and dispel shadow clones many times, and can witness Hazou being a Good Person multiple times throughout the journey. There's the risk that Naruto catches on to our plan since he has experience performing personality drift himself, offset by the fact that he uses shadow clone all the time anyway so we're not making him change his behavior significantly. It's also an angle that probably nobody else has tried to weaponize against him in terms of social manipulation. If we go this route, we should check with Mari on the risk of Naruto catching on and how to ensure Naruto actually gets a positive impression on us instead of accidentally boosting his ire.
Chakra let's him foom and tutoring gives xp bonus. But it's still not unlimited XP. Jutsu and elemental natures still cost xp. So the question becomes do other elemental natures have jutsu that scales well with chakra, That is worth more than increasing fundamentals such as alertness?
Each Element costs 1000 XP, that's a pretty big chunk of change for a 16 y/o, no matter how talented. I would be surprised if he has more than 2 or 3 Elements total.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Yeah, we made him snort/chuckle against his will! Sure, he threatened violence against us, but I think that's just a cultural thing, similar to how ninja cheat in games by default. (For ninja) I don't think threatening violence carries the same weight as it does for us, irl. Kei threatens violence every other sentence, and even "thought about" killing Anko for seeing her cry during her own wedding ceremony.
Beyond that, I think Naruto's using the threat of violence in the same way that Jiraiya used to: as a blunt social instrument to remind us that he's "strong enough to kill you where you stand, and politically important enough to withstand the fallout." He's using it as an S-ranker language of "I'm impatient, and this is important to me. Please tell me."
Sure, it's rude and inconsiderate, and we should really probably figure out how to bioseal a deadmans's switch into Hazou's body, but Jiraiya was an extremely influential person in Naruto's life. Naruto's personality and toolkit is going to be shaped by Jiraiya's influence (we should be wary of leaning on this too hard, of course. Naruto had other tutors and mentors in his life).
True, but Naruto never had to spend XP on CP, and if Jiraiya/Orochimaru's personal sealing notes allowed free XP, then imagine what personal training from S-rankers and Jonin would provide? And that's not even going into whatever other benefits being a Jinchuuriki might inherently provide. Or what Minato's Bijuu Seal (the literal best one in canon, a feat that seems to be repeated in MfD) might give him.
Naruto's a special case several times over. 16 or not, I could see it.
Chapter 522: Opening the Rift
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
It had been three days.
Three miserable, frustrating, aggravating days.
Yuno and Akane had been sweeping the perimeter and training their combat skills against one another. They were holding up fairly well—the weather was nice, there were no demands on their time, and they could either have time with people or time alone as desired. Akane and Hazō were annoyed that they couldn't use their Shadow Clone training, but it simply wasn't safe out in the wilds. Creating a single Shadow Clone took almost half of Hazō's chakra, and then it halved what remained by transferring it to the clone. Yes, he recovered whatever the clone had left when it popped, but that still left a frighteningly long period of vulnerability. Without Noburi available to refill their chakra it simply wasn't worth the risk while out in the field. Instead, Hazō focused on helping Kagome-sensei work on re-opening the rift. When he wasn't doing that, he started sketching designs for a new seal, a version of ARS that was contact-only instead of ranged, but could be activated through chakra adhesion like the skywalker seal. As it turned out, this was harder than expected.
Between not being able to train in the usual way, the lack of progress on cracking open the rift to the afterlife, and the challenges with his own project, Hazō was ready to chew nails. He decided to take the afternoon of the fourth day off. He meditated, did slow soft-style taijutsu practice, and treated himself to some of the Fourth Hokage's notes on the bijū-containment seal. It was widely regarded in Leaf as the pinnacle of seal theory—at least, the little that anyone could understand of it. The notes weren't pedagogical material, they were the drafts and scribblings of a working researcher; they were 80% opaque to even the best sealmasters in the village. The 20% that could be deciphered was brilliant. Seal theory in Leaf had advanced simply based on the scraps that lesser men could decipher of the Fourth's work on this one seal. He had solved multiple long-standing issues in chakra alignment and collimation, meaning that seals using his principles were much more robust against changing astrological effects, meaning less inclined to fail during infusion. To this day, sealmasters fought to get sufficient security clearance to work on the notes and slaved over them for their entire careers once they had it.
"Agh!" Hazō shouted, throwing his hands in the air after slaving over the notes for four hours.
"What?" Kagome-sensei asked, looking up from the stew he'd been glowering and poking at without tasting.
"These," Hazō said, waving the skinny leather-bound folder. "The Fourth's notes on his bijū-containment seal." He looked at the folder. "Actually, I take that back. This is volume three. There's seven more like it, and none of them make a damn lick of sense." He flipped a few pages. "Look at this! He starts the infusion from the middle of the seal, and then he does multiple injections at different locations! He injects the chakra at multiple locations, tracks it through separate sections simultaneously, and then unites it into a complete whole right at the end—at least, I think that's what he's doing, because it's the only way to make a scrap of sense out of this insanity! Plus, his notes are nothing like Jiraiya's—Jiraiya's were detailed, they included safety precautions and design theory, and everything was neatly organized. These are nothing but two pages of design notes, a few prototype blanks that make less damn sense than the notes, plus some instructions on infusion patterns that make even less sense than the blanks." He gestured to the blank on the right. "There's intakes where there should be outputs, and there's not one but two separate shield curves over the entire left side of the blank, which should prevent it from drawing in chakra in the first place. No chakra in so it shouldn't start in the first place and if it somehow did then the whole thing would blow up in your face. Yet obviously they don't." He glared at the pages. "Plus, it's all..." He shook his head. "I don't even know the word. I want to say 'unprofessional', but..." He waved the journal in an offended way. "There's squiggles and Sagebedamned shopping lists in the margins!"
Kagome-sensei snorted and stretched out a hand. "Let's see."
Fortunately, Kagome-sensei had the clearance. Hazō handed over the journal and watched as his teacher flipped it open and skimmed through page one. Hazō smiled slyly; he had done the exact same thing and knew what was going to happen. Reading the notes without virtually memorizing the first page simply wasn't an option if you wanted to have the least clue of what the author was talking about.
Kagome-sensei turned his gaze to the second page and paused. He stared at the page for a good fifteen seconds, then went back and re-read the lefthand page carefully. He turned back to the second page, read it carefully, and then looked up at Hazō, eyes wide.
"I know how to do it," he said, his voice awed. "I know how we could open the rift. We can't do it, but I know how."
"What."
Kagome-sensei nodded slowly, the papers forgotten in his hand. "We're thinking that the rift was a storage bubble with one transshift canal here and one in Naraka, right?"
"Yeah?"
"So, the problem is that any energy we pump into it from here is going to spew straight out the other canal."
"Okay..."
"Unless we did it from both sides at once. The opposing energy streams would block each other and if you pumped in enough chakra it would inflate the storage seal again. Except if we want to work on it from both sides at once, we'd need a rift in order to inflate this rift."
Hazō frowned. "Just pumping chakra in wouldn't do it. You'd need—"
Kagome-sensei slashed the words off with one curt gesture. "Yes, yes. More to it than that. Can't just shove chakra in like you're wall-walking. We'd need an aetheric pump and a Nakamoto Glide. Still, that's easy stuff."
"A Glide?! Don't be ridiculous! That's way too piddly for the amount of energy you'd need. You'd want—"
"Not the point! The point is that anything we try from this side is going to gush out the other side and disperse. We need to create some kind of stopper construct. Something that will pass through the first canal and jam in the second one. If we can actually manage to secure it then reinflating the pocket would be...well, not straightforward, but doable. We'd need to be sure we didn't get any frame dragging, and that's tricky if the energy is going in from only one side." He frowned, thinking and sketching in the air with one hand. "We could maybe do it with a puffbomb."
Hazō frowned. "If you're puffing into a shaky construct you could get torsion. Maybe even rupture."
"Maybe, but what if..."
o-o-o-o
The theories had been sliced up, chewed up, and mashed up until all that was left was a smooshed pile of notes and ideas to investigate. As fun as that was, now it was time for something that might be even more fun or a massive disaster. Coin flip odds, so far as Hazō could tell.
The team was gathered around the firepit, the sun having set moments before and the stars only now beginning to spill themselves, jewel-like, across the dark velvet of the night sky. The night was brisk but the fire was large enough that everyone could have at least their front half comfortable. Until now they had been supplementing their rations with food caught onsite—fish from a nearby river, small animals that Yuno had hunted up, and eggs that Akane had stolen from a temporarily unguarded nest. Decent fare, but a lot of work. Tonight, at Hazō's request, everything was from a storage seal and prepared by the talented chefs of the Gōketsu estate.
"So," Hazō said, poking at his fish fried rice, "rescue plans. What do you guys think?"
Akane looked up from her honey-glazed bronzini. "Rescue plans?"
"When Kagome-sensei and I open the rift, that's the first part of the plan. Walking Jiraiya out of the rift and back into reality is part three. In the middle there's a bunch of searching and walking around through a forest that went as far as I could see. Well, or somehow getting a boat in there and sailing across an ocean of acid. How do we do that safely and effectively? For example, we need ways to cope with potentially hostile terrain or creatures, and we probably aren't going to be able to use chakra. What's the move?"
"We'll need civilian experts," Akane said after a moment. "There were merchants who came to the Liberator camp in Iron. Some of them traveled with only civilian guards. They'd know how to move a large group of people and supplies around without using chakra."
Hazō nodded thoughtfully. "Makes sense. We'll also want to do something to mark the rift location. I'm thinking we use MaRI and MEW to create a tall, easily-visible tower at the rift site so we can find our way back. And so that anyone in the area who isn't us can find the rift without needing to be led there."
"Could be bad people in the area," Kagome-sensei noted. "Not everyone is friendly."
"True, but it looks like no one there has chakra."
"You did," Yuno said. "So did Daizen, even though he died."
"...Okay, fair. Still, there's clearly some kind of chakra leaching effect. That's why my seals went bad."
"Or, maybe they didn't get chakra drained, they got scrambled by passing through the rift," Akane said. A moment later she shook her head. "No, never mind. The skywalker worked at first and then failed suddenly."
"There's another problem," Kagome-sensei said. "Leaching effect will kill you if you're in there long enough. Even without it, you presumably can't regenerate chakra. If we can't afford to use chakra then we'll cover a lot less ground per hour, so search radius is a lot smaller. And if we get more than a short distance from the rift we won't be able to risk fighting if there's anything dangerous. Can't afford to burn too much chakra, then discover that there is an active chakra drain but it only happens at midnight or something equally ridiculous."
"We could signal," Yuno said. "Start big, smoky fires, then hold blankets over them briefly so that the smoke goes up as a series of puffs instead of a single column. It draws attention and would motivate people to come to the source."
"Maybe," Kagome-sensei said. "Or maybe they run from it because they think it's a monster. Or maybe they've all been enslaved by whatever lives there and are chained up in a mine somewhere."
"Contact with another nation is hugely complicated, and I didn't see anything living aside from me and Daizen," Hazō said. "For purpose of this conversation, let's stipulate that the only intelligent people there are humans who died or came through the rift. We can deal with the complicated situation later, but let's look at the basic issues now. What other problems will we have?"
"From the description you gave us, Jiraiya did not appear to have suffered physically," Yuno said. "He was not wounded or emaciated, correct?"
"True," Hazō said. "Which suggests that either there is something there that humans can eat or else the temporarily dead don't need to eat."
Akane raised an eyebrow. "Temporarily dead?"
"I mean...the whole point is that we're going to bring them back, right? So, yeah. Temporary."
Akane smiled in amusement and Hazō's heart leaped. Whatever improvement she might have made, those smiles had been rare as plums in fall and it was good to see one again. "I see."
"The one that worries me is the memory loss," Hazō said. "Kagome-sensei, you've dealt with more seal failures than I have, and I'm sure there were some memory issues in there. How do you deal with something like that?"
Kagome shifted uncomfortably. "Um...memory issues aren't really something to worry about."
"Why not?"
"I mean, it's not like you have ever forgotten anything important, right?" Kagome said. "Watermelons have always been sweet, there's never been a universally-available jutsu for shapechanging, and there's always been only seven colors."
"Seven colors?" Akane asked, frowning. "There's lots more than seven."
"Only for women," Hazō said seriously. "Women have extra color-detection structures in their eyes that allow them to perceive a wider array of colors. Men can only see seven."
She narrowed her eyes, looking back and forth between him and Kagome. "Extra structures, huh? How exactly do you know this?"
"I was reading one of Noburi's medical books," Hazō said. "You can check for yourself when we get back. Fascinating stuff."
"What are you talking about?" Kagome demanded. "Of course we can see more than seven! I was talking about major colors, but obviously we can see shades of them."
"Aww, Sensei," Hazō whined. "Why did you have to give it away? I had her going there."
"I had wondered," Yuno said. "I have not seen any such thing in Noburi's books."
"You've read Noburi's medical books?" Hazō asked.
"Of course. He is my husband. I care about him and this is something that he cares about. Obviously I learned enough that I could understand at least some of what he's talking about."
Akane and Hazō both looked immediately guilty.
"That's impressive," Hazō said. "Going back to the earlier topic, I'm thinking that when we are doing SAR on the other side of the rift, we should keep detailed chronicles of everything we do and see and learn. More than just briefing notes, something that will help the next team gain familiarity with the ground we covered and what we we learned and how."
"That makes sense," Yuno said. "Also, those skysliders of yours might be useful. They require no chakra, true?"
Hazō nodded. "Good idea. Yes, they require no chakra. They are a bit clumsy, mostly good for straight-line travel, but they will save a lot of time and keep people safer. Also, lighting a whole lot of fires can help them gain altitude." He frowned. "They need high ground to launch from, but the development team has had limited success flying them off a very tall ramp. If they launch over a long strip of big fires and if you're lucky and careful then it can be enough to let them gain just enough altitude that they can double back to rise up farther."
"Landing them in the woods is a problem," Akane said. "They would need a lot of space to come in safely. If there was no such space then they would crash. And once they were down they couldn't launch again."
Hazō nodded. "True. The usual answer is to have a ninja use skywalkers and skytowers to haul them up high enough to launch from, but that might not be possible on the other side. Couldn't rely on the seals to stay functional."
"What about sky lanterns?" Yuno asked. "I saw them in Leaf, for the winter solstice. People lit them and let them float into the sky. They were small but maybe you could build a big one?" Everyone turned to her in surprise and she hunched in. "Or not. It's a dumb idea. Sorry."
"No," Hazō said. "No, I don't think it's dumb at all." He forbore to mention that he had once had a similar thought and since forgotten it. "I'll put the research team on it as soon as we get home. In fact, I wonder...could you...hm." He slouched against his backrest log, nibbled absently at his food, and lost himself in the possibility of a sky lantern large enough to lift a skyslider.
[EDIT: Based on the discussion, the tone of Hazō and Kagome's conversation didn't come through. The essence of it is that if you had someone on both sides doing the thing simultaneously then it would be relatively easy. Working from one side, much harder. Kagome and Hazō are grasping at straws to come up with an idea that might work, and anything that either of them proposes the other typically shoots down.]
XP AWARD: 17
Brevity XP: 4
"GM had fun" XP: 3
It's late and I don't have the charge for the Yuno conversation so I will leave that in the capable tentacles of @Velorien. Voting is closed unless he opens it.
You have done 4 days of prep on a new pressure-activated seal that, when triggered, will activate the seal it is in contact with.
If voting does end up being opened then it will end on Wednesday, .
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