Thinking a bit about stealth necromancy again. The main obstacle to just going in and exploring (once we can open a rift in the first place) is that such an activity will probably be visible to the Akatsuki and they'll secure the site and take us into captivity as soon as we exit. We've brainstormed ways around this, such as bunkering down for a seige or hoping to keep them all distracted long enough to complete our mission, and if we can move the rift then that's certainly the best way to keep the rift out of Akatsuki's hands, but I keep circling back to "wouldn't it be nice if they just never knew that we were in there in the first place?"
It's easy enough to leave no traces behind. We can close the rift again by just throwing some local wildlife back and forth through it until it's pinprick-tiny, and if we just go there to put someone in and leave it can look like just another unproductive visit to the rift: Akatsuki certainly doesn't seem to go red alert over that. We can also skywalk in and leave no traces if we wish, but I digress. If we then leave the site completely and come back some time later, weeks or months, Akatsuki would have no clue that necromancy is actively ongoing, and we could complete it without detection. The problem with this approach is that it leaves someone on the other side of the rift with no avenue of communication with the outside world. They'd know where the rift site is, and they'd know how to return to it with anyone they find, but they're on their own until the rift opens up again.
And how to open the rift up again? I mean, we could do it the second way the same as the first way, by presumably bringing Naruto along and giving a very loyal Leaf-nin a first-hand look at necromancy fulfilled. This can naturally come back to bite us once he goes back to Leaf: even if we haven't rezzed anyone Leaf would frown upon, Asuma would immediately take control of the rift site as a critical Leaf strategic resource, which may interfere with our goals.
But we keep hearing that the modified Minato Seal wouldn't need an abundance of chakra if it was being activated on both sides of the rift. If we have a sealmaster on both sides, each with a MS8.3 (or RS3, Rift Seal 3, as I would personally call them), Naruto doesn't need to know a thing. Sure, our intrepid explorer couldn't walk back into Leaf without tipping Naruto off, but this would still allow us to extract people without either Akatsuki or Leaf detecting what we're doing.
So where does that leave us? We go to the rift, Naruto opens it up, someone goes in, we close the rift, everyone goes home for a month, our explorer goes and looks for people. What then? After that month passes, how do we get both sealmasters activating RS3 at the same time?
Well, before tackling the timing, this is a moot point unless we can ward off the path drain. That's pretty much a hard prerequisite for this route. We need to either keep RS3's alive for the entire timespan, or Hazou/Kagome needs to retain enough chakra to make new ones (and in such a circumstance our explorer would be forced to be Hazou or Kagome). But let's say we get that, how do we solve the timing?
And I'm thinking, the Rift Seals are supposed to send chakra constructs through the rift, right? Could we make a fourth rift seal, designed to send a signal through the rift? Our explorer sitting on the other side would, say, hear a loud sound from the rift and know that the home team is on the other side ready for exfiltration. A minute later on the dot, both of them activate RS3 at the same time and re-open the rift. No Naruto required, no prolonged presence Akatsuki could spot, in-and-out necromancy without any traces left behind.
A little more work adds some redundancies to this plan: if the first attempt fails, the home team withdraws for a short span of time agreed in advance and tries again. After a few more rounds of this, if unfruitful, the home team goes back to Leaf and gets Naruto for a proper one-sided opening. That is to say, stealth necromancy can be made to fail gracefully into a variant that only keeps the Akatsuki out of the loop while letting Leaf learn what we're up to.
Once again, if possible moving the rift still appears the obvious correct choice to me, but I like having a backup plan like this ready to go. There will come a question of what research projects to focus our attention on, and Rift Seal 4 might take a back seat to more "Plan A" necroseals, but I would say that stealth necromancy is a good Plan B before we resort to Plan C scenarios like "outlast the Akatsuki in a siege". In short, we should take this idea and propose it to Kagome (to vet Rift Seal 4) and Ami (to vet socio-political viability and payout) at some point in the near future.
