- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Mari, why is there a twelve-metre statue of me holding an Icha-Icha book over the main entrance?"
"I lost the vote to Kei and Snowflake. I'm sorry."
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
- Start date
-
- 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
"I lost the vote to Kei and Snowflake. I'm sorry."
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Because it is objectively the thing that would Jiraiya the most amused.
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
He's dead.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I don't understand the obsession with deliberately displaying an oversized version of Jiraiya's package on full blast. It was like, mildly funny at best, and comes with a slew of issues that have already been explained to us.
The consistency in bringing it up as a legitimate course of action to take has stopped being funny to me and is just pretty weird to me now tbh
The consistency in bringing it up as a legitimate course of action to take has stopped being funny to me and is just pretty weird to me now tbh
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
No, the thing that would objectively amuse Jiraiya most would be finding out that Neji is espousing the glory of Youth, Hiashi was Hokage for five minutes before he got owned by Rock, and that we're now a better sealmaster than he ever was.
Jiraiya would go 'hah!' and move on with his life, and probably have some questions for us about our judgement.
It would be a massive pain in the ass to keep the clothes on stone Jiraiya looking nice (they'll wear quickly in the wind and weather, rubbing against stone won't be kind to them) and if we want the joke of everyone in Goketsu coming through Jiraiya's crotch, we can do that much more subtly with a fully-clothed stone statue.
We also avoid having to deal with his penis being vandalized as a tradition of graduating the academy.
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sure - and that's why I'm not ducking culpability. The idea is to communicate why we broke the deal. They've already communicated that they find it marginally more acceptable to break a deal with Pangolins than other folks. IMO this implies that
I'm pretty sure we were collectively surprised that 90 Skytowers per month let the Pangolins steamroll the Condors entirely. Maybe they didn't lie, but they sure as heck omitted information.
And the real big deal here is that our ignorance didn't just have consequences for us. 'Goketsu got screwed' is one thing and I'd be happy to take that on the chin, but we didn't get screwed. This was a great deal for us! We screwed ourselves to save the Condors and to curtail Pangolin aggression, which would have extended to the Otters and whoever else.
I'm relying on CCnJ to do some of the heavy lifting there, but I expect the Rats to take us at face value and to probably have some answers for us.
I expect that they say that they have value more sacred than keeping their word and to hem and haw over how you manage a deal where you later realized you were ignorant when you made it.
I wonder what the thread is doi--
[the return of the "give the statue a dick" discourse]
...I think I'm gonna close this tab for a bit.
[the return of the "give the statue a dick" discourse]
...I think I'm gonna close this tab for a bit.
- Location
- Europe
No? Not really?
We sold ten Towers in Chapter 107:
Then in Chapter 115, Panda told us that they already started or were planning to start a war with the Hyena and Leopards.
And, oh hey, an armistice already!
Closest thing to misinformation (that I can think of) is that they told us this:
They never really hid their intentionin front of us. And all of that was a lot of Chapters before the deal that Jiraiya adviced us on.
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Interlude: Questionable Losses, Unknown Gains
- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Interlude: Questionable Losses, Unknown Gains
It was, for a change, a bright and sunny day in central Leaf, though the chill breeze made it clear that winter wasn't giving up without a fight. Hazō had just come back from deploying his shadow clones for WHOOSH training when he recognised a familiar figure standing at the compound gates, studying the daily hustle and bustle of Gōketsu life with a logistician's analytical eye. It was, however, not Kei, who preferred documents to people and would happily memorise every last detail of these people's lives if it meant never having to talk to them. No, this individual would get bored of watching and start making conversation in five minutes, and have every Gōketsu secret known to its civilians in thirty. Hazō's sealing headache was still pulsing in the back of his head, so he really hoped she wasn't in the mood for hardcore verbal sparring.
"Ami!" Hazō called out. "It's good to see you back."
"It's good to be back, Hazō."
Ami took several measured steps towards him, as if gauging distance. Then, before he knew it, he found himself swept into a tight hug.
It didn't measure up to an Akane hug, the unfair standard by which the hugs of the world were judged. It lacked the maternal reassurance of a Mari hug, the "I can't believe I'm doing this" charm of a Yuno hug, or the raw determination of a Kei hug. Nevertheless, allowing for Ami's lack of Hazō-hugging practice compared to his close family, it was a very fine hug, the kind one would hope for from a trained expert doing her best.
"I'm so sorry to hear about Akane," she said over his ear. Hazō nodded.
After a few seconds of this, Ami stepped back, but kept her hands around his upper arms in what seemed oddly like a precursor to shaking sense into someone.
"With that said, Hazō, you need to get your head in the game. I heard about the seal bank, and I've talked to Kei, and it's making me worried."
"What do you mean?"
Ami let go of him and beckoned him into his own compound. Hazō promptly took the lead in guiding her into the main building.
"Your behaviour," Ami explained, "closely resembles that of an ordinary person grieving for a lost loved one."
Hazō nodded, unsure where she was going with this, and maybe slightly offended by the implication of ordinariness.
"To reframe, your behaviour does not match my model of someone aware that said loved one is merely a permeable dimensional barrier away, little different to my recent sojourn in Hot Springs save that she requires some labour in your part before she can make her return. It is not the behaviour of Gōketsu Hazō, so certain he was about to conquer death that it required two of Leaf's most brilliant women to convince him that some obstacles remained. I had hoped to return to find you annoyed that the need to rescue Akane as well complicates your timetable, not riven with pain that drives you to irrational behaviour and snap decisions with far-reaching consequences."
Hazō didn't know what to say. On the one hand, reproaching somebody for the way they grieved was about as insensitive as it got, and it wasn't something he wanted to hear from a friend. But on another, more Hazō level, it should have been exactly what he wanted to hear: absolute faith that he would conquer death, together with equal faith that he would live his life as a person worthy of that ambition. Everybody else who knew about the project still just nodded when Hazō acted as if death was an irreversible tragedy.
Defensiveness won out over admitting he wasn't the person he wanted to be.
"That's not how this works, Ami," he said. "People's feelings don't switch off just because they're irrational. Losing Akane hurts even if I know I'm going to get her back."
"No," Ami allowed. "Lies are not less real because they are lies. My profession would hardly exist otherwise. But Hazō, you can't ever let yourself forget they're lies. If Kei went away to a mission on another continent, and I found myself grieving as though she was dead even though I fully expected her to come back, my priority would be to shrug off this weird sickness as soon as possible. Rationality, or half of rationality, is recognising when your heart is lying to your head and not letting it get away with it.
"I do get grieving, Hazō. I am who I am now because there was a time when I thought I'd lost Kei forever. But that ended. Thinking someone's lost forever and counting the days until you can be together again are completely different feelings. Being stuck in the wrong one is like a curse. It's like genjutsu. It's something I'd wish on my worst enemy if I was more of a hands-off kind of girl.
"If what you want is to stay in the genjutsu until Akane snaps you out of it in person, that's your right. Being a supportive friend to somebody whose lover didn't come back from a mission is a role I've played countless times, and I can play it again for you. But my advice to you is don't try to salve the pain. Don't try to get used to it. Use it the way pain is meant to be used, at least outside the bedroom: as a signal from the spirits in your body that something is wrong and you need to take action now."
But you couldn't just turn off grieving. People didn't work that way, or they would do it in a heartbeat, excepting those who thought grieving was a way to respect the dead or whatever. Not that Hazō did. It was a cruel and miserable soul who'd find satisfaction in knowing their absence was causing their loved ones pain. Someone like Jiraiya would surely be at his happiest when the Gōketsu were gathered around a table, talking about what an amazing hero and writer and husband and stepfather he'd been, and laughing merrily as they recounted stories of his great adventures and misadventures. (Wow, Noburi really was wiser than people gave him credit for.)
So where did that leave Hazō? He didn't know how to turn off grieving, and Ami was conspicuously not offering to tell him. He didn't think being able to turn off grieving was natural, and he had a feeling that if Orochimaru had a seal for it, that seal wouldn't come without a cost for Hazō's soul. (Come to think of it, this was starting to sound oddly plausible.) On the other hand, if grieving for Akane contradicted his sincerely-held beliefs and it would only make her sad and he didn't believe it had inherent moral value… just why was he defending his right to do it?
"I need to think about this, Ami," he said. "It's… a lot."
"Sure thing," Ami said. "I'd say take your time, but y'know, every second of this is unnecessary suffering, so I don't actually want you to do that.
"I get how it's a bit of an explosive tag to the face, though, and those take processing. Remind me to tell you about the time I conducted a Mori social experiment and then ran the numbers and found that, statistically, praying to the ancestors doesn't improve your loved ones' odds of survival. That wasn't a good day.
"On more urgent topics, who does a woman have to get engaged to to get a mug of hot chocolate around here?"
Hazō suddenly realised they'd had the entire conversation in the entry hall while he was too off-balance to offer basic hospitality.
"Right this way, ma'am. I mean miss. Definitely miss."
-o-
Some relaxing Kagome-style spiced hot chocolate did wonders to relax both of them. Soon, Hazō and Ami were lounging on a sofa in the atrium as she regaled him with tales of hapless world leaders struggling to adapt to a new world order that fundamentally made no sense to anyone raised in the shinobi world (a narrative only a handful of people in the entire world were capable of telling) while he reciprocated with stories of his Conclave antics (a narrative only a handful of beings in the entirety of two worlds were capable of telling).
"You actually said that?" Ami laughed in disbelief as Hazō concluded his description of his struggle with the diabolical Taxiarchos. "Hazō, if your stones were any bigger, you wouldn't fit through the gates of Leaf!"
Hazō shrugged modestly. "Sometimes you just have to take an approach they don't see coming, right?"
"Preach it, brother by the transitive property!"
Ami sobered a little. "You'll notice that I didn't mention any of my Akatsuki-wrangling hijinks. I may have pushed a little too hard after I heard about Akane, and it might be a good idea for me to avoid a certain overgrown manchild known as Uchiha Itachi until I figure out how to appease him. But suffice to say I didn't walk away from my weeks of diplomacy empty-handed. What about you and your A-Day preparations? I'm assuming that since you had free run of the place without the Hokage to constrain you, you're about to wow me with massive progress?"
Er.
"I'm still not sure how on board I am with Operation A-Day," Hazō stalled. "There are some big risks involved."
Ami nodded. "And when you've got something better ready for me, then I can switch tracks. That's kind of the point of the preparations we discussed. As long as we've got all the intel and the groundwork in place, we can apply them to whichever plan has the best odds at the time–which is currently Operation A-Day. So what have you got?"
"Like you heard, I've made a lot of progress with the Conclave. That's been taking up time."
"Sure," Ami said. "But I was asking about rift preparations. Nothing happening at the Conclave is going to affect the timer on Akatsuki taking over the world."
What had Hazō done that might help with the rift? Obviously, there was the fact that he was steadily progressing with his sealing research... but no, that wasn't what Ami was looking for, was it? To her, the priority was solving the Akatsuki problem. If they couldn't do that first, then it didn't matter if he finished his research tomorrow. It would still be game over as soon as he opened the rift and Akatsuki found out.
Fortunately, he knew where to start.
-o-
"Hazō," Asuma said with a smile, "you never fail to exceed expectations. Even knowing that, I have to admit I'm impressed."
"Sir?" Hazō asked. His headache was pounding after Aburame Manjiro's intensive grilling, and instead of getting to spend the day in bed, Asuma had instead promptly called him up to the Tower.
"I could say that Manjiro gave you incredibly high marks, but that doesn't begin to cover it. Manjiro is quite reserved and confident in his abilities. It says something that you left him convinced that he was the inferior sealmaster."
"Is that so, sir?" Hazō asked. He'd known he'd aced the test, but Manjiro had remained stiff-lipped throughout in regard to Hazō's prospects.
"He doesn't mince his words. Manjiro plainly indicated that upon concluding the examination, you had convinced him that you understood sealing as a whole better than he did. I get the vague impression that some of his final questions were actually him probing you for advice on a new project, rather than intended parts of the exam, as he included them in the transcript but didn't comment on their implications. Regardless, I'm very pleased to see this."
"Does that mean that I will be promoted, sir?" Hazō asked innocently.
Asuma chuckled. "Ordinarily, there would be a practical component too, having you research a seal that Manjiro grades as safe for your skills but a suitable challenge for jōnin level. Given the circumstances, I hardly think that is required. Manjiro impressed on me that it's not really possible to cheat your way through a sealing exam even if it's only book learning, and he seemed almost offended at the thought that you might be denied the rank. Yes, Hazō, I'm officially authorizing your promotion to special jōnin."
Hazō didn't feel any particular relief or joy at this pronouncement. Still, he smiled. "Thank you very much, sir. I look forward to seeing what I can do for Leaf with the responsibilities of this new rank."
"On that note," Asuma said, grabbing a sheaf of paper within the desk, "I have your first mission. When researching seals, you should always be willing to refuse a project if it risks sealing failure, even if you're already partially done with it, and you should take as long as you need."
Asuma handed the sheaf over. "These are the research notes for a particularly strong barrier seal, called the Fourfold Seal of Preservation. It's an attempt at recreating the the Fourfold Violet Flame Barrier, which, if you've heard of it, can withstand even Kage-level attacks of most kinds–though the seal version has certain limitations the ninjutsu doesn't. The last sealmaster capable of making this died in the battle at Nagi Island, and most of our reserves of the seal were destroyed in the Collapse. They're quite useful, and I should mention that a noteworthy perk of missions for sealmasters is that you get to benefit from the seals that you research."
Hazō flipped through the papers. They contained research notes in an unfamiliar handwriting and what looked like a number of blanks. "Thank you very much, sir. I will look into it. If that's all…?"
Asuma waved his hand in dismissal. He picked up a piece of paper to examine it. "I'll arrange the formalities. You're free to go."
Asuma lowered the paper fractionally and looked Hazō over.
"Sir?" Hazō asked.
Asuma smiled again. "Nothing, Hazō. I was just thinking that, a year ago, I wouldn't have bet that you'd be the first of the young crop of summoners to make this rank. Noburi and Kei are far from achieving a special jōnin rank, though I have no doubt of their ability to get there eventually. Still, I think you've shown really impressive progress in this past year. Only Neji might have made it there before you, but you edged him out.
"This is between you and me," Asuma said conspiratorially, "but I've heard that the Hyūga have been preparing Neji for a similar promotion. They might be annoyed that you stole their fruits just before harvest. Maybe you could send Hinata a letter apologizing for undercutting Neji like this?"
"Ah…," Hazō said, "I wouldn't want to be rude like that."
Asuma winked.
"Regardless," Hazō said, "I'll use my position as Leaf's youngest jōnin wisely. I wouldn't want to aggravate the clans more than they need to be aggravated, of course."
"Regrettably, you missed that title by weeks," Asuma said.
Hazō raised an eyebrow.
"If you had any other cohort to compete with, you'd easily be the youngest to special jōnin among your peers. Unfortunately, you're competing with Uchiha Sasuke."
"I hadn't realized that he was… quite that strong, sir."
"Naruto tends to take centre stage in their team. Plus, there's the long shadow that his brother cast, though I doubt anyone will ever make jōnin quite as young as Itachi again.
"But really, don't fixate on the ages too much. Yes, feel free to brag and light the fires of ambition in the hearts of your peers, but getting a rank early doesn't mean anything in itself. The Fourth Hokage only became a jōnin at 21, and in three short years, he was Hokage! What you do with the rank matters far more than how early or how late you attain it."
Hazō smiled. "I do intend to do big things, sir."
Asuma chuckled. "Just make sure they're big in the right direction, Hazō. I told Sasuke to spend more time training with Yuno, as I think they'd have a lot to teach each other. It's a shame that you don't have a peer or rival to push yourself against in the same way."
"Orochimaru is plausibly my peer in sealmastery."
"Yes, but he's Orochimaru."
"Right enough, sir," Hazō said with a sigh. "Now, if that's really all?"
Asuma waved him off. "Right, thank you for sticking around and breaking the monotony," he said, gesturing to the paperwork around him. "I'm starting to understand better why Dad liked to tell all those stories. Good day, Hazō."
-o-
"Nice work," Ami acknowledged concisely. "That'll help. What else?"
"Nice work?" Hazō demanded. "That's it? To one of the youngest special jōnin on record?"
"Mmm," Ami said. "You told me you were a sealmaster on Sasori's level. Passing the special jōnin exam should be ticking a box for you. It's nice that you did it, but congratulating the sealmaster who's about to create a permanent gate to the afterlife on becoming a special jōnin is like congratulating Mari on seducing a civilian. If you're as good as you say, acting genuinely impressed is practically an insult."
"Hmph. I was going to invite you to the party, but–"
"Hazō!" Ami exclaimed. "Special jōnin, that's amazing! I can't believe you cleared such a major hurdle at your young age. I'm sure you'll go on to do great things."
Hazō sighed. "Ah, forget it. Of course you're invited. You'd probably just gatecrash it anyway in some completely incomprehensible way that drove me crazy as the host and still somehow made people like you more."
"See, you get me!" Ami beamed. "So, special jōnin rank. What else?"
The headache pulsed. Hazō couldn't tell if it was pressing down on his thoughts and stopping him from thinking of the obvious, or if nothing was springing to mind because there was nothing there to begin with.
"I've secured one-on-one clan head tutoring with Asuma."
"'You have super potential so the Hokage's going to undermine his neutrality to push you into the top tier' tutoring or 'You're a disaster waiting to happen so the Hokage's going to undermine his neutrality to save Leaf' tutoring?"
"Um."
"Whatever," Ami said. "An opportunity to charm the Hokage in private is an opportunity to charm the Hokage in private, and, y'know, freaking him out enough to regularly give up his time for you is an achievement in its own right. I'll take it."
"Also, the seal bank should help me build public support," Hazō ventured, "and it'll certainly preserve Akane's memory."
"You don't need public support for the rift," Ami said. "All you need from Leaf is the Hokage's ear and the ability to choose a loyal team to go through. Besides, the seal bank mostly wins you points with the KEI. Kei and I are both on Team Rift and can get what we need from the KEI anyway. As for preserving her memory, why do you need that when you're about to bring her back?"
"Because Kagome-sensei says people in the afterlife fade away once no one remembers them," Hazō said. "Did I not tell you that?"
Ami gave him a sceptical look. "I'll believe in Kagome the first time he coughs up a verifiable source. Heck, even an unverifiable one would be a start. But I can't blame you for not wanting to take chances, so let's move on. What else do you have for me?"
"I…"
Surely there was something. He couldn't just tell Ami that while she was risking her life trying to get intel out of Akatsuki, he was just… getting on with things, advancing his own plans and managing his own crises, and maybe some of those were coincidentally helpful for dealing with the issues surrounding the rift.
"You know what," Ami interrupted, "you're clearly not in the best headspace right now, so maybe we should just set this aside and come back to it another time. I think we've established there's nothing I urgently need to act on."
She gave him one last look, then rose from her seat. "If the gentleman would kindly escort me out?"
-o-
Special thanks to @Paperclipped for the Asuma scene.
-o-
A/N: The original version of this chapter didn't make it clear that Ami was asking specifically about Akatsuki-related preparations. This frustrated many players, since it made it look like Hazō's essential work on researching the rift seal was being overlooked for no reason. Additional lines have been added to Hazō's inner monologue to clarify this. A more extended discussion of the seal bank was also added.
Voting for action plans is closed. However, Hazō is about to be posed a question so important that we've decided to give you special planning time for it ahead of the coming update.Next update, Asuma is going to convene the EM Council and invite feedback on his decision to destroy Isan using Elemental Mastery. If Hazō has any arguments against doing so (or, indeed, arguments for), this will be his only chance to present them. Please vote in a plan for Hazō to follow during the meeting (instructions for what to do before it will not be accepted since he has no advance warning).
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@eaglejarl, @Velorien, @Paperclipped
1. Was Leaf able to secure the exclusive deals with Isan on Fire Element Justu at the Chunin Exams?
2. Was Asuma able to TH a replacement for EM with limits on how cold it can get?
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- Location
- Yes.
faflec.reaction.
- Location
- how about no
Ladies, Gentlemen, and Others Who Defy Such Limiting Classifications,
The Eagle has landed.
That's one small step in Sealing.
One Giant Leap for Necromancy.
Is it reasonable for us to edit the seal research section to do a prep day for the new seal we got? I don't want to run the action plan for 10 days and not do that.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
So, this is most likely a Jounin-tier seal that will require SSA and possibly prep to work on. We can afford to put it off for a while but probably not too long. I don't want to burn goodwill with Asuma by blowing off the mission for a couple months, but I also don't want to delay Necromancy at all (especially not after our conversation with Ami just now showed that we really need to make progress as fast as possible).
Right now, the Minato seals do not seem to need SSA or prep days. That is to say, we can afford to have a Shadow Clone researching them instead of Prime and it'll be just as fast (though costing us incremental amounts of FOOM XP). What we can do is put Prime on the Fourfold Seal of Preservation and a Shadow Clone on the Minato seals and then, when the necro-seals start requiring Prime's attention, we put the Fourfold Seal of Preservation on hold. The partial progress we achieve along the way will convince Asuma that we're not slacking.
If my understanding is correct, this allows us to keep going full-speed ahead on project Necromancy without compromising any of our other goals. Nothing else seems to demand our full attention at the moment (even the Conclave is mostly Enma by now, absent the nonlinear time of the bonus updates) so we can and should be putting our full effort into this.
- Location
- USA
- Yes
- Yes
If the intention is to determine the difficulty, Hazō already has the research notes. He rates it as "chūnin-level".
- Location
- The Soviet Republic of Canuckistan
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Clarification: if Hazo says nothing, is the effectively-certain outcome that Isan will be destroyed?
Rather: do the words 'only chance' mean that Asuma will be making a final decision regarding the fate of Isan at the end of the meeting, period?
There's a reaction post coming for that chapter but my brain is slowly leaking out my ears so it won't be right now.
So Ami here is social fu'ing us to try and get us to focus more on this, right? We have made steps to get ins with more clans, we are doing seal research, and there is definitely the issue of akane dying in this time frame. Despite this, we got pretty clearly steam rolled, at a time when we were a bit mentally vulnerable, having deployed clones and had a sealing headache.
Despite that, both she and kagome do prolly have something of a point that we could do to focus more on this perhaps? Have we even really talked to kagome much about necromancy since akane passed? Maybe that's something we ought to do, see what he thinks would be good to look into (though I suspect it will be looking into the Minato chain, like he has pushed us to a couple times).
Well, after we deal with dealing with EMing Isan.
Despite that, both she and kagome do prolly have something of a point that we could do to focus more on this perhaps? Have we even really talked to kagome much about necromancy since akane passed? Maybe that's something we ought to do, see what he thinks would be good to look into (though I suspect it will be looking into the Minato chain, like he has pushed us to a couple times).
Well, after we deal with dealing with EMing Isan.
Vel, stop making me agree with Ami.
I'm inclined to wait until we're on a seal that needs SSA and no prep and run them in parallel.
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- Location
- UK
- Pronouns
- He/Him
HDK the consequence of staying silent.
Asuma intends to make a final decision one way or another, barring a truly compelling reason not to.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Hmmm, sorry yeah you're right, the SSA consequence would delay the work on necro-seals even if we're not using SSA with the clones. So yeah, we should probably instead push forwards on mono-necromancy until we start needing to use SSA, and then start work on Fourfold.