Another option would be to limit the scope of the seal bank to, for instance, four seals per academy graduate, one time only, instead of a perpetual seal allowance. I don't know how many academy graduates there are, or how long it would take our seal smiths to make those, but it seems plausible that could be a 10 hour per week obligation?
There are around 400 Academy graduates per year. Producing 4 seals per Academy graduate would take around two weeks of sealmaster time, or around two days of Hazou's full-SC time. Around half of the Academy graduates are clanless, so if you wanted to limit to clanless students who don't have a clan's money to buy seals, it would only take around one week of sealmaster time per year, or one full day of Hazou-SCs.
AFAIK (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) our seal smiths mostly get to do as much or as little sealing as they like, sell the seals they make, and make a ton of money doing so. If we were to instead command them to spend a significant fraction of their time making seals for us, which they don't get any money for, that's essentially a huge unpredicted expropriation from our seal smiths (and only our seal smiths) which I think is almost invariably a bad idea in the long run. Our clansmen loose trust in us (because now they know we might spring something like this on them at any time) fewer people are willing to learn sealing, and everyone in the clan is going to be more hesitant to make long-term plans or investments to make themselves better off because we could seize the gains from them at any time, unpredictably. Same reason civilian peasants won't make investments.
Your junior sealmasters, Shinji and Kazushi, spend around five days per month paying their own and Hazou and Kagomes seal tax to the Tower. They spend another three days making seals to satisfy the clan's prodigious demand for explosives and storage seals. After that eats around a quarter of their month, they are free to do whatever they want, essentially. They may make more seals and sell them for their own pocket money, relax, train, or even do sealing research.
@eaglejarl @Velorien @FaintlySorcerous Can I assume that Doing The Thing From FS's Omake also includes making sure we're not breaking leaf law in any way?
You should make sure there is a check with Asuma, as by default it is illegal to give out seals outside of your clan. Normally, the Tower has right of first refusal on any seal transactions, and would definitely buy any seals you are offering for free, but you may be able to convince Asuma to let you directly pass these seals to those in Leaf that need them most.
@Paperclipped Request. Could you please summarize what we know of the timeline of Akane's mission? From assignment to prep to leaving, notifying the clan, expected length and how long after start the attack happened. Trying to understand window for spies to get message to attackers.
Jan 5, noon: Akane is assigned the mission. She notifies Gaku as Hazō is on the Seventh Path.
Jan 6, morning: Team Akane leaves the gates of Leaf.
Jan 6, (unknown time): Attackers enter Fire and find Team Akane's tracks.
Jan 6-7, (unknown time): Attackers engage Team Akane and leave the Fire Country.
Jan 8, night: Expected completion date for the mission.
Jan 10, night: Mission can now be marked late and escalated.
Jan 11, night: Mission must be marked late and escalated.
Jan 14, morning: Hazō discovers that Akane's mission is critically late.
Attacker times are unknown because Canvass cannot smell the hour of the day off of them. She's confident they attacked before sunrise of Jan 7, because there was only one meal's worth of scents at the clearing.
