He doesn't know that though
Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest
- Thread starter eaglejarl
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- 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 open voting
Cariyaga
Handsome Gentleperson
- Location
- United States
He will the moment we try to negotiate with him about it.
- Location
- The Maple Syrup Mountains
Suppose you are Orochimaru. You have been working on the 3D Seal project nonstop since you gained access to it. You've been there with Goketsu Hazou, who surprisingly proved to have a similar level of insight about it.
You know that Goketsu Hazou has somehow memorized the shape of the Great Seal with his bloodline, and can create replicas of it if he so chooses (though his precision is lacking and makes the replicas of limited use). You have sent him your research about 3D Sealing and he has managed to keep up, though he has not given you any truly new insights as of yet.
You are aware that the task ahead of you is threefold: you need to find a viable substrate (bones don't work, sadly), you need to find how to shape the substrate into a valid seal (would be so much easier if you could use bones), and you need to understand 3D sealing theory enough to infuse it.
Hazou shows up one day and says that he's figured all that out on his own. Somehow, he's not lying. He shows you a 3D seal made out of a unique crystal that he obtained somewhere, that he most likely shaped with his Earthshaping jutsu. He demonstrates that it is, in fact, an infused 3D seal capable of producing an iconic sealing effect: the explosion.
How did this happen? Clearly what you are seeing is the truth, so there must be an explanation. Given that the substrate is a crystal, you understand how Hazou cleared the 'shape the substrate' requirement. You don't know how he sourced the substrate in the first place, but you know the world is wide and full of mysterious wonders: it's not too implausible that he got lucky.
And the 3D sealing theory? He got ahead of you somehow, despite merely keeping up in all your previous interactions. As impressive as it is that he can keep up at his age, something else must explain how he could have passed you (you know that he didn't just barely beat you to the goal because you know that you've still got a ways to go yourself. Somehow he got significantly ahead of you).
The two things he has access to that you don't are the substrate and his bloodline memory of the seal. Now that you know what you're looking for, it won't be long before you have your own substrate, one way or another. (you could try to recreate it with a jutsu, you could attempt to find it the same way he did, both of those remain open even if you choose not to stare him down until he gives you the answer). You may not have a bloodline recording of the seal, but you have access to the real deal. Hazou's understanding of 3D Sealing wasn't ahead of yours in previous conversations, so it's unlikely that his bloodline is the source of all these insights. More likely, some combination of his knowledge of the Great Seal and his access to viable substrate allowed him to test his hypotheses far more quickly than you, and so his rate of research - already peer to yours - sped up considerably, to the point where he could beat you to the end so thoroughly.
You accord some probability weight to the idea that his bloodline gives him unique information that you would not be able to obtain yourself through manual study of the Great Seal, but given what he's told you about his bloodline it seems far more likely he simply has a clearer image of it in his head than you, which means you could obtain the same results yourself with enough effort. Of course, you disdain the idea of research being made to wait due to the fetters of petty men, but you ultimately do not believe that Hazou's help is strictly necessary for your success. It is unclear how much Hazou's advantages sped him up, but from your own incomplete research you can tell that the degree is significant at the absolute minimum.
You very much want access to the knowledge in his head. This is the most important thing in your life right now, in more ways than one, and Hazou's cooperation would dramatically hasten your timetables. You are still inclined towards fair deals and inclined against wasting time, so you would appreciate if he made a simple request in exchange for his cooperation. There are few things, you imagine, he could request that would cause you to balk. Nonetheless, such requests do exist that would cause you to reject the deal: at the end of the day you do not truly need him, and if he believes he holds the most power in this room he is sorely mistaken.
Ultimately I think he'd be willing to pay out the nose of "normal" stuff he doesn't care too much about. Money, old notes, jutsu, he's given us all that before for less. It's basically a given that we could get more of that, a lot more of that, in exchange for cooperation here. But past that the cost rises steeply. The justu and seals he relies on in combat would be a huge OPSEC breach to share, compromising his survivability. Same with one or more of his methods of immortality. Sending him against Sasori, as mentioned, poses grave risk in the moment and endless trouble to deal with afterwards. Any amount of time commitment we ask of him would be weighed against the time he expects to save by accepting this deal, which he would likely rate as "significant" but not higher. The odds, in his eyes, that Hazou's help is actually hard-required for this project would be minimal, especially if you include the odds that Orochimaru goes and actually kidnaps a Kurosawa to investigate their bloodline if he winds up truly believing it is necessary for his ambition. And there's always the "stare Hazou down with Intimidation: Yes until he stops being a problem" which would probably convince Hazoupilot to lower his expectations so that he's allowed to leave the room alive.
In the end I expect to get a lot out of this deal, very valuable things that may have been beyond our reach even when we were selling dragon parts, but there is a limit. Orochimaru will only agree to so much if he believes he could obtain it himself through a longer route, and he is very unlikely to believe otherwise given the information he has available. I also do not think we could safely try and create that impression in our negotiations, particularly because we would need weapons-grade precommitment technologies to prevent him from forcing the answers out of us even if we managed to succeed in convincing him. I think we should set our sights on something very valuable, perhaps one single thing that he would be very reluctant to part with, but avoid trying to back him into a corner in the hopes of squeezing even more out of him.
- Location
- a
Also, worth noting that if we do reveal this to him(something I personally still disagree with), we effectively have to suceed in the negotiation. This is because his own knowledge of us knowing we know PS is enough to accelerate his progress.
If we fail, we effectively gave PS away(minus a few steps) to him without gaining anything.
- Location
- UK
I sincerely think @Crunbum's point has been pretty clear and reasonable and your rephrasing is less true to it.
Well, I did mix up/assume Kon AI to be a man, so credit where its due. I think the degree to which one rates inconvenience is sufficiently subjective that I might rate as mild an inconvenience that someone else might rate as extreme or anywhere in between, especially depending on the contextual outlook one assumes. Taking a bit longer to heal the Severe might well be extremely inconvenient for Hazou right now and leave him moderately less capable of achieving critical goals in the short term, but give it a year and he would likely shrug off the recovery having taken a week or two less as something of mild importance. Hardly something worth spending a price in lives of other people for, in my view, and that was the point of the post.
I will admit that I'm a bit annoyed by EJ's insistence to "FTFY" my words in an aggressive manner since I don't find any fault in my wording this time around and believe it uncalled for, but ultimately I think my intended point (lives vs time) got across and I can be a handful so I'm used to it haha.
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I'm not gonna go through your whole post cuz it's very long, and I agree with 90% of it. I do think you're possibly overstating your case a bit but Oro is very arrogant, so perhaps not.
This has been discussed before, Oro was astonished that we could keep up at all at Hazou's age. Much less while we're been dividing our focus so many different ways at the same time. He had been monofocusing on the GS for weeks, and Hazou was able to keep pace with him (if not surpass him) in the course of a single night of a study. It's not impossible that Oro accepts Hazou is the superior sealmaster. As galling as he would find it.
I do think that we should probably sell when our Consequences heal. Optimize with Mari and Ami first and see what we can get out of him.
Of course he might be Hokage by then so we should temper our expectations.
This has been discussed before, Oro was astonished that we could keep up at all at Hazou's age. Much less while we're been dividing our focus so many different ways at the same time. He had been monofocusing on the GS for weeks, and Hazou was able to keep pace with him (if not surpass him) in the course of a single night of a study. It's not impossible that Oro accepts Hazou is the superior sealmaster. As galling as he would find it.
I do think that we should probably sell when our Consequences heal. Optimize with Mari and Ami first and see what we can get out of him.
Of course he might be Hokage by then so we should temper our expectations.
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Yeah, I'm not too keen on it, either. I really, really do not want to empower the madman. Unfortunately, Hazou-pilot thinks that Orochumaru will be able to rediscover 3D Sealing on his own.
If Orochumaru is going to get 3D Sealing anyway, might as well leverage it for something.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
First, this was a great post and I agree with a lot of it.
That said, I can think of a relatively easy way to break the chain right here. I won't say more because QMs aren't supposed to volunteer information, which I guess I'm doing now but...uh... Nah, I got nothing. Bad QM, no biscuit.
- Location
- Liverpool
As someone who would likely be in that perceived majority, I have three thoughts.
First, Naw, I get them generally as well as you, I just ask questions about the ones I don't get (or when I get corrected, I clarify and then apologize and move on), which gives the impression of understanding them as well only if one takes assertions of understanding as evidence of understanding, and acknowledgement of learning as a negative. There's nothing wrong with admitting you were wrong, and you're now more knowledgeable. And it's downright encouraged to thank the people putting in effort to point out the mistakes, rather than dismiss them.
Second of all, even if what you posted is true, is there a world in which taking that approach is likely to succeed? Like, saying most readers aren't trying to engage in the mechanics isn't going to endear you to them. Also, that's not the standard you're being held against, and the regulars will notice you're moving the goal-post (even the more lurky ones like me), because what your need to prove isn't that you're more knowledgeable than the participants that don't participate or understand things, it's that you are more knowledge than the ones that do, and have been correcting you or explaining alternatives in a clear and sensible fashion.
And third. Yo. This isn't the first time you have brought up "if only we had done stuff differently, Akane might still be alive". At the time, your pitches and lobbying on the investment right before that last battle weren't really noteworthy. That's totally okay! But since then, you've used that argument a lot of times. Even when many of us have done analysis to show that your suggestions likely wouldn't have worked, for character reasons (what Akane would or wouldn't have done, given the context of being a sensei) or for mechanical reasons (you were just wrong as a matter of fact on some of those issues). And when we pointed out that saying "hey, Akane is dead because y'all misspent the xp" is hurtful, and unfair, and not even particularly likely to be true. I already talked about why your approach isn't likely to get people on your side, so I won't go into that again. Instead, I will just say, on this topic: drop it, and please don't bring it up again. Because it increasingly makes me just skip over everything you post, and I doubt I'm alone in that at this point. And that isn't to anyone's optimized outcome. So, help with the CURRENT, ongoing build issues, instead of getting to play hindsight critique on the same issue. Or, just stop. Either outcome on this topic would be appreciated.
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- Location
- United States
You've already pointed out that Orochimaru won't be able to obtain sufficient reference material from studying the Great Seal in person, if it helps.
- Location
- Italy
We just need to convince Oro we didn't use Earthshaping, possibly with the help of Mari and Ami, then we cut both his possibility from 3D sealing, because he will ignore Earthshaping and make our value skyrocket.
...
Or you meant "chuck the explosion at Oro and kill him".
EDIT:
But yeah, why exactly we need to show him the seals? Just tell him we discovered 3D Sealing, and we're willing to trade for it, he can assume we're lying, but we can simply say "If we're lying that you can simply not give the stuff we asked for or something, the Hokage would help you if we decided to scam you"
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- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not what I was thinking of, but it's another consideration. What I was going for above was "I think you have a solid argument but it depends on this paragraph right here and I can think of a relatively easy way to break one of the assumptions here such that you (don't have to worry / can worry less) about the downstream issues."
EDIT for clarity: @Inferno Vulpix this is no criticism of you or your argument. I thought of this idea solely because I started from the scaffold you had already built.
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Tell Oro outright that the crystal is from the Honey Cave?
This lets hims study PS much sooner(bad!), but greatly limits the amount of substrate avaliable to him(good!), and sets him to exterminating weird chakra crystals(?probably bad?).
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Edit: but this still requires him to learn ES 30 or so, and then the jutsu will start hinting at deeper powers.
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That's a fair take and I did act kinda shitty there, but Stompy's reaction was too. Its not like I wrote some sweaty effortpost about Akane's XP having been misspent, no, I was just deliberating on how likely the risk of Akane (a jounin) being captured and leaking EM was to be a concern in the calculus for Asuma/Shika potentially killing her to reduce the risk, which is relevant to this chapter because of the Hidan ending - someone asked for rehashing of possible reasons they'd have to do that. And then, at the end of said rehashing, I made one short mention of the Akane thing in "ceterum censeo carthaginem esse delendam" style, which I maybe shouldn't have because its an old argument that didn't need rekindling. But then Stompy felt the need to latch onto that part of the post (which was rather irrelevant to the point at the time) and reply to that and only that in a malevolent manner. Its what he usually does from my PoV, pick one problematic sentence out of a wider post of mine, ignore everything else, quote it and fashion his reply into a personal attack with the express goal of making me appear like a villain, a joke, or both, and he did that purposefully several times over the last week alone, so y'know. I might sometimes mention things that don't need mentioning, or make mistakes for that matter (which is more frequent than it'd have been if I hung out on discord where it'd not be walls of texts but more of an exchange of thoughts which allows for spotting errors early rather than after posting several pages of text). I might be unpleasant to talk to at times. But I talk in good faith and don't attack people unprovoked, only their arguments. He, on the other hand, does the latter quite often in an "innocent" way, which gets me annoyed, and when I'm annoyed I write walls of text, which gets everyone else annoyed xp.
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Hazou thinks he can with his advanced diagnostic jutsu/seals. Much harder for him, it's true, but Hazou thought he could.
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Ah, that's when everything went wrong." --the QMs.
- Location
- United States
By his own admission, that's not something he can do "in person." He needs his lab equipment, and thus a highly accurate model of the Great Seal in his basement (which he also needs Hazō to make.)
Orochimaru cannot obtain sufficient reference material by studying the Great Seal in person. Arguably, even a detailed lab-analysis won't be enough; remember, the QMs were not even sure that having all possible information on the Great Seal downloaded via the Iron Nerve would qualify. Even in ideal conditions (which require Hazō's aid), it would take Orochimaru a long time to get information close to as good as what Hazō has.
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- Location
- Texas
PSA: SSA now buffs combat stats. Yes, all the combat stats. Please, dear Sage, go punch something (without getting laid out for months afterwards).
- Location
- Yes.
[X] Hazou trips and punches himself in the face
True, but how do you expect to convince Orochimaru of this without risking another round of bloodline-related kidnappings?
Thanks for this, this source had left my memory many moons ago
- Location
- Book Fort
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Didn't we already make it?
- Location
- United States
Not of sufficient quality for his tastes. Remember, even with perfect knowledge of its structure and dimensions the QMs weren't sure we had sufficient reference material. Our model falls way short of that, even if Orochimaru is able to fully analyze every detail of it.
Would one explosive really be enough to convince Oro that we've cracked 3D sealing? I feel like a 3D storage seal would be more convincing, since you can activate it multiple times, and you can see how big the new storage limit is, or how the constraints on storing stuff have changed. IIRC storage seals are also mid-genin, which should be possible with out 26ish PS right?