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PSA: This update will be an interlude.

It's a short voting cycle and there's important political stuff going on. Also, through a combination of things that was 95% poor choices of bedtime on my part but very slightly trouble getting to sleep and therefore I'm focusing on the latter in order to escape blame, I ended up with less than 5 hours sleep and can predict that this will not be a good writing weekend.

Which is a shame because I was super excited to write the doping experiment.
On a scale of 1-10, how fun would the following be?

[X] Interlude: Hiruzen and Jiraya Teach the Hyūga Elders the Pink Pony no Jutsu
 
[X] Whatever EJ wants to write, we trust him.

[X] Interlude: Hazou-Pilot and Ino Fairly Negotiate for Goo Bombs, in Good Faith, Like Reasonable Adults
 
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[X] Interlude: Hiruzen and Jiraya Teach the Hyūga Elders the Pink Pony no Jutsu

[X] Whatever EJ wants to write, we trust him.

[X] Interlude: A puppetmaster no more
 
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Man my brain has to be so weird. Cause I have literally the opposite feeling. Basically nothing has happened and we've mostly just been spinning our wheels waiting to grind sealing and FOOM XP
Honestly, I don't think the two are all that mutually exclusive. Putting out fires may be necessary and important but it doesn't really create the strong narrative throughlines that you get when we're proactively actualizing our goals.

This encounter with Hidan and associated Jashinist fallout? Interesting, dangerous, important, but 100 chapters from now I probably wouldn't be able to place when in the timeline it happened. There are a lot of things like that, story arcs that flesh out "Hazou's adventures in Marked for Death" without feeling like they're integrated into the main story and core plot beats.

(Which, again, not to say they don't have an impact. Our talk with Hidan may have distracted Sasori and bought us extra time for necromancy, for instance.)

In the respect that we have been working on main plot stuff, we haven't seen a breakthrough yet. 3D Sealing is still languishing as a theoretical discipline, and necromancy progress is a bunch of seal research that hasn't paid out yet. Just as before, despite the plot points being important and necessary we aren't in a position to feel anything more than the investments we've spent. The tree is growing but there are not yet any fruits.

When we do strike gold, when the tree bears fruit and the main plot comes to a head as we make important decisions with the fate of the world in the balance, it'll all feel worth it because our eyes will be on the thing we achieved, with so much work put into it. But here and now we can only see the work put in, so the satisfaction of a goal well-achieved isn't real yet.

In another story, another world, we could have maybe skipped over all of this. A non-quest story could line up some dominoes and timeskip from the start of the necromancy grind to the day Hazou opens the rift. But part of MfD's quest nature is that, to earn our victories, we have to control Hazou every step of the way. Each seal in the Minato chain needs to be voted in, decisions to be made on the tradeoff between speed and safety, whether to multithread with SC and what else to research if so. This limbo period, where we put in work and it seems to lead nowhere yet, it's an unfortunate consequence of the fundamental nature of the game. But it won't last. It never does, we always find our way back to the main plot sooner or later, and then we'll save the world or doom it or whatever the cards have in store for us.

(Also, strictly personally, the EM cabal feels like a pretty "main plot" thing in my mind, so that big fancy Chapter 600 where it all comes to a head and the world is irrevocably changed as a result of it feels very much like meaningful motion to me. Regardless of whether it was a good decision or a bad one, a reading order list certainly wouldn't describe that chapter as skippable.)
 
Clarifying stagnancy interaction with sealing research
After receiving abundant feedback on how stagnancy might interact with sealing research, we want to make the following tentative statements about how we'll handle the interaction. As with stagnancy as a whole, these are all things that we're trialing – and if they end up producing unfun or unintended results, we'll simply change or remove them.

First, Hazō does not necessarily need to finish a project to remove stagnancy. Similarly, a single project may not necessarily be enough to remove stagnancy, if the complexity is low. Fewer rolls will be required the harder the project is.

Second, Hazō can roughly tell whether a project is likely to challenge him, and to what degree. For projects that he has more veterancy in, he'll only know after an infusion roll. For other projects in completely new domains, he may know after only a single prep day. This is because in newer domains, he can more easily understand what all he doesn't know and needs to learn, whereas in areas where he has veterancy, he needs to get more in the weeds to discern whether there's any new experiences for him to learn from.

Third, if you pick some axes of variation (e.g. numerical bonus, # of activations) and request that Hazō adjusts the project along the axes so that it removes stagnancy, we'll try our best to pick appropriately so that the project is difficult enough to remove stagnancy. Example:
  • Research Reusable Rocket Boots (vary bonus, # of activations to remove stagnancy)
Finally, in the interest of good faith, Hazō can remove the XP penalty associated with one Sealing stagnancy barrier while he is working on an appropriately difficult project. This is meant to match combat stagnancy, where we said we'd suspend penalties as soon as Hazō took a combat mission that was likely to remove his stagnancy.

An additional note: Hazō should try to remove sealing and combat stagnancy with his main body. Due to the inefficiency of SC memory-transfer, it will be much harder to remove stagnancy through Shadow Clones.
 
An additional note: Hazō should try to remove sealing and combat stagnancy with his main body. Due to the inefficiency of SC memory-transfer, it will be much harder to remove stagnancy through Shadow Clones.

Given that you specified that it would be harder and didn't say impossible, does that mean that it is in fact, at least in theory possible to remove combat stagnacy with SC memory-transfer assuming a sufficiently large amount meaningful combat encounters are completed by a given characters' shadow clones?
 
On a scale of 1-10, how fun would the following be?

[X] Interlude: Hiruzen and Jiraya Teach the Hyūga Elders the Pink Pony no Jutsu
I'm never sure what to make of these posts. Surely if the suggestion is fun we will write it at some point, and if the suggestion is not fun we will ignore it. Beyond that, gauging something on a ten-point scale seems like too much effort for too little gain.
 
Given that you specified that it would be harder and didn't say impossible, does that mean that it is in fact, at least in theory possible to remove combat stagnacy with SC memory-transfer assuming a sufficiently large amount meaningful combat encounters are completed by a given characters' shadow clones?
It's possible, yes. It simply takes a lot more work.
 
Shadow Clone was crafted for spycraft, not training. It's why the XP accrual from Shadow Clone training is so inefficient. Really, this just further compounds that fact.

"Technically possible, but difficult, since you're using a jutsu for a nonintended use."
 
I seem to remember at some point having a conversation with Mari about what it would take to get SC for Kagome or Yuno. Does anyone know what I'm talking about and can they tell me what chapter it was in?
That did in fact happen, I wrote it, and for the life of me I can't find it. @faflec ? +1XP bounty for finding it so that I know I'm not crazy.

In the respect that we have been working on main plot stuff, we haven't seen a breakthrough yet. 3D Sealing is still languishing as a theoretical discipline, and necromancy progress is a bunch of seal research that hasn't paid out yet.
I really wish you had waited 24 hours to post this, because now it's going to look like I'm pandering. :/
 
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