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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Interlude: Minato's Poetry, Part 1
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    • Readers with an especially good memory will recall that, after Hazō got mauled by reading the Great Seal, Asuma gave him access to Minato's notes on bijū containment. A few chapters later, Hazō got hold of a bunch of Minato's assorted other papers, including some of Minato's famously awful poetry.

    A while back @Twinnstars approached me with a commission to actually write some of that poetry. They wanted 3500 words of it. I said to myself "I can write 1500 words per hour before editing and the stuff is supposed to be bad so it won't require much editing aside from basic spag. It's only about 3 hours work for easy money. Done!"

    Yeah, turns out that poetry isn't the same as prose even when you're okay with it being bad. At the same time I experienced a complete collapse of motivation, to the point where writing MfD is pretty much the only thing I do outside of work, hence why there are a bunch of questions and rules work hanging fire on my lazy butt. Fortunately, Twinstars has been incredibly patient with me about this, for which I offer many thanks. The commission is still not finished, but here is the start of it. I'll post more when it becomes available.


    Kushina's Ode

    Kushina, Kushina
    My beloved, my love
    ugh. trite​
    My beloved, my delight
    eh. not quite the right feel​
    My beloved, my uplifting one
    too verbose​
     My beloved, my joy
    TODO​
     Sweeter and softer and brighter than
    the softest rainbow, her sweetest pie's pan
    because her pie pans are always polished mirror-bright. too much in-joke?​
     Your hair so fair so shining red
    is it to me or about me, you dimwit? :P pick 'you' or 'her' and stick with it​
    stay out of my drafts!!!! they aren't done and they are private!!!!!​
     Well past heart's blood, rose hips, rubies held
    Behold, behold, your flashing eyes upheld
    she keeps her head up even when things are hard...better way to say this?​
     All bliss proceeds from, my heart proceeds to
    Thee.



    Home

    I am home
    Threatless, unthreatened
    Unwatched, unwatching
    Warm. Well-fed. Soft bed
    Loved.



    New Life

    I deal death
    It is my life's work
    I murder, and rend, and gut, and burn
    In service to Leaf and the Will of Fire
    I wade through blood every week, every day, even every hour
    I am Namikaze 'flee on sight' Minato
    not Namikaze 'jutsu crafter' Minato​
    not Namikaze 'research sealmaster' Minato​
    not Namikaze 'poet' Minato​
    From the day of graduation to the day of ascenion to the present day
    I am Namikaze 'flee on sight' Minato.
    Today, Kushina's flows were absent yet again
    Her belly swells with life
    I am, at last, a creator.
    Sage, help me craft a world where my child need be naught else.



    The Seventh Musing on Sacrifice

    A street dog named Angles scans over the Third.
    Arf, arf! says Angles to the band's three chords.
    The viola-ette shouts "The records of your music are not fair! Go slightly deeper!" to the mid-subterranean bass-man.
    The notes they blend, they bend, they curve back upon themselves with a widdershins turn,
    within the stain'ed walls that frame the dancer
    "Not true, not true!" she cries. "Reverse your course lest this dance shall chaos bring!
    "Let not the words of record your steps constrain! Step down, step down, step down, and cross them all away!
    "To build your own dance, the truest form, shalt thou dance by threes, stepping lightly to your part and skipping past the painful paving stones.
    "No mere papermaker's issue can record / the truest steps of this dance / lest frozen words by clumsy, hateful, heavy-footed folk be gained. Dance in truth or dance with death, your choices are alone."
    it's a good thing you're cute, because you are weird​
    what did I say about going into my drafts? It's an experimental form​



    The Will of Fire

    Dancing love, brightest gaze
    Always moving, never time to laze
    Duty leads to freedom, my people's lives to raise
    Courtyards wide and houses tall,
    Water, food, and health for all
    Each and every dusty road
    Every twist and turn and alleyway
    They came and sought and found abode
    Threaten Leaf's great peace and thou shalt pay
    I, the Fourth, standing straight and plain
    I swear by honor, I swear by name
    Reach out your hand as peaceful friend
    All past trouble shall we mend
    Raise up your hand as raging foe
    To a forgotten, unnamed grave thou shalt go.



    A Dream

    I rested, alone at home, with sake and scrolls to hand
    On the battered couch I lay
    Overstuffed, lumpy, patched and worn
    Built by a villein of Leaf, a man of the Warring Clans domesticated
    He learned the trade from his father and he from his
    His hands were knotted and gnarled after decades of pounding nails and packing batting
    His wife, plain-faced and brilliant-smiled
    Ten births, three children, seventeen grands
    His tools and wood and batting form a web across Fire, perhaps across the world
    Every strand a link from man to man to woman to place to time
    A web of Fire's past and present, this battered old couch
    That drew my father to its faded clutches at age thirteen
    It was a spring-to-winter marriage, my father twelve years younger than the faded emblem of human unity that supported him
    Its support he now lacks, traded long since for a cold and lonesome ditch
    It embraces me instead, asking naught but that I recall
    Its lumps and bumps and all
    Where to set my feet and where I should curve that the couch
    The couch my father bought, that the villein made, this his father trained, that all of Fire supplied
    May hold me close in the dream of Fire.



    So Little

    This cold and gloomy yestermorn
    I wandered a dark and dusty street
    A fruit man I happened on to meet
    Long-gone 'twas, the day he was born
    Face like an apple, wrinkled and brown
    Rheumy eyes, two teeth, and a smile so round
    "Praise be," he cried aloud
    "Why so?" I asked.
    "I've my apples and home," he said, his voice so proud
    "From Mist did I flee,
    "To make a new home beneath your mighty tree,
    "Protected I am, by all from genin to thee,
    "Medicine for me and school for the lad,
    "And for him a greater life than I've had."
    I smiled, brave and bright and wide to hide that my feelings were sad
    How little he asked, how small a gift for him I had.



    A Joyous Morn

    Today I abandoned my last
    I crept away, silent and fast
    To my home did I stride
    And spirited away with my bride
    With drink and blanket and food
    And orders that ANBU never intrude
    On a babbling brook's winding bank
    We spread our blanket and shed our rank
    The wind is warm, the sunlight bright
    In beloved's belly, our child turns
    At the feel, my joy so great it burns.
    Kushina smiles, we kiss, and all is right.
     
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    • Interlude: Minato's Poetry, Part 2
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    • The second installment of my commission from @Twinnstars in which I was asked to write the famously bad poetry of Namikaze Minato, Fourth Hokage, the Yellow Flash. Yes, I am going to keep writing these forwards in order to emphasize that the poetry is supposed to be bad.




    The Sinister Seventh Chronicle

    Spin, spin, the blinding winds of autumn's day
    These the winding ways of air and sky
    First, second, third the times I say my wish
    Neither word nor image captures my need to fly
    May I ever craft a jutsu strong enough to lift
    Me far above this, the quarter wheel of earth's great compass
    Loft'd high and far until I turn my face down to greet the sun
    Spin, spin I shall, to widdershins and deosil both alike
    Weather smiling bright or yet weather raging dark and loud
    Fly far shall I, and never again kneel to reflect
    Upon the searing light of truth, nor never yet this, the painful weight of history
    Strong First, brilliant Second, wise Third, but now a straw-filled useless Fourth
    Nor the boundless gyre of times agone, this mortal world whence they're from
    Twisted and tangled, its pathways trod 'til packed, hardened, beaten down upon, and the light to blackness fall
    Chance or fate, a hand upraised is either greet or slay, what is wrong or right?
    Fire's Will, the choice to hope, a future bright and shining white, closing, nearing and then
    Blossoming. A dream to come, a hope in which to dwell, thought upon thought upon a stack
    of longed-for desire. My love, my child, my teacher/hero, my village all, all my strength bent to them
    A life of service is the first bargain I ask of fate, love the second, life a distant third
    My life an ode shall be, a tale carved in stone and fire, to grant to youthly minds the image
    Of their due, their duty, their needed deeds. Honor's strident burn is quenched by service; this my lesson to dwell upon
    This morseled wisdom torn from time's grasping, greedy claws, my final words to thee: Of your high-stacked choices, keep love at top.
     
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    • Chapter 514: That Dragon Which Slays Love
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    • Hazō ran for his life as, mere metres behind him, the Dragon pursued its rightful prey. The shattering noises of broken branches and the screeching of terrified tree rodents heralded its coming, and Hazō knew without having to be told that his bones would fare no better than the wood if it finally caught him in its maw.

    He sensed the monster preparing to dive, and sent chakra roaring through his muscles in an instant, life-saving chakra boost—

    He was out of chakra.

    His daily shadow clone training, combined with all his evasion up to this point, had left him out of chakra.

    He glanced around desperately. That tree would be too weak. That one wouldn't give enough cover. That one was out of reach. That one…

    There was a boulder just out of reach, a perfect Substitution Technique target for someone who had the chakra. Hazō didn't. Still, there was nothing else. As the Dragon's maw began to close around him, Hazō leapt…

    Noburi's Humongous Dragon 30 + 1 + 6 = 37
    Hazō: Athletics 37 + 6 = 43

    …and Noburi's Humongous Dragon smashed helplessly against the stone at Hazō's back, showering him in chakra construct water that would evaporate with eerie speed by the time Noburi caught up with him.

    "I'm out," Hazō shouted. Even without seeing Noburi, he could picture the smirk on his brother's face, him with his stupid Vampiric Dew and stupid enormous chakra reserves that meant he could keep going forever and ever while Hazō was stuck spending most of his chakra every day on training that wouldn't pay off until he became a physical god with the power to reshape world politics with a single punch.

    "I'll get you next time," Noburi declared as his, yes, smirking face appeared from around the boulder. "You know, I'm starting to have my suspicions about why you keep putting off my ninjutsu training."

    Hazō didn't dignify the insinuation with an answer. Instead, he collapsed against the boulder, suppressing a groan as his muscles complained about their continued existence. Noburi redeemed himself by handing over a waterskin before sitting down much more casually next to him, not even out of breath, the showoff.

    "Hey," Noburi said, glancing back at his technique's trail of destruction, "do you ever worry that all our massive AoE ninjutsu and explosives and stuff are messing up the natural environment?"

    "Nope," Hazō said immediately. "The Gōketsu policy is to give as good as we get. If the natural environment ever stops trying to mess me up, then I might consider it."

    "There's plenty more forest where that came from anyway," Noburi agreed. "It just popped into my head because of stuff Yuno's been telling me about Isan and forest management. Obviously, they've always needed wood to build with, and to clear space for farmland, but at the same time, they couldn't afford to overdo it and have the Tea ninja notice that someone was cutting down trees in this supposedly uninhabited area, or damage chakra beast habitats to the point where chakra beasts started moving out and ended up making the clans send extermination squads."

    "Huh," Hazō said. "Things are… OK with Yuno, then?"

    "Sure," Noburi said. "Right as rain. Nothing to complain about here."

    Hazō filed this response under "potentially suspicious" and carried on. "I know it must get tricky for you two, with her coming from such an alien culture. Honestly, I'm impressed at how well you've been making it work."

    "It's still a work in progress," Noburi said. "Like, I can memorise weird Isanese rule after weird Isanese rule, and she appreciates it, but I feel like there's this background mindset that I can't quite get my head around, and everything would suddenly snap into place if I just did. You know what I'm talking about, right? Like the way people in Leaf have all these weird cultural assumptions that they don't even realise are there, and then every now and again, you go 'What the heck?' and they have no idea why you're overreacting to something perfectly normal—or reacting at all, really."

    "I think I get it," Hazō said after a second's thought. "You mean like the way people here talk about politics. They just start talking about it in the street, no precautions. Sometimes they even start discussing it with strangers, and your first thought is, 'Are you crazy? Do you want to have the secret police knocking on your door tonight?', and then you remember that in their heads, the world doesn't work that way."

    "That," Noburi agreed. "Or how when a Leaf couple divorces, sometimes the kid gets a say in which parent to stay with. What kind of twisted, topsy-turvy logic do you have to follow to arrive at that being natural?"

    "You're kidding," Hazō said. "You mean it doesn't just go to the mother? How does that even make sense?"

    "Exactly," Noburi said. "But if you ask them why they do it like that, they just look at you funny, like you're asking them why forehead protectors go on your forehead. And then, Isan's in its own tier of weird, and I swear there's some kind of underlying logic there, but I just don't get it, and until I do, I'm going to keep tripping up. Which sucks for her, since I'm the only person here with any grasp of Isanese culture whatsoever. Nobody else has a chance of meeting her in the middle."

    "It seems like it's working out, though," Hazō said.

    "Kinda sorta," Noburi said, wiggling his hand in the air. "You have to talk a lot, and you have to make sure you're not talking past each other, which is a lot harder. There's a kind of cultural Clear Communication Technique involved, only it breaks down really easily as soon as someone goes 'But your way doesn't make sense', which is really easy when you're dealing with Isan's customs, because they don't make sense."

    Hazō nodded. He'd had more than a few conversations like that, especially with Akane, but occasionally with Kagome-sensei as well (though it was impossible to tell whether his objections were due to him having come from a different village still or due to him being Kagome-sensei and having very specific views on what was and wasn't "pants-on-head crazy").

    For a while, the pair just leaned back against the boulder, Hazō enjoying the pleasantly cool feel of its shadowed side after exercising on a hot day.

    "There's no point dancing around it," Noburi finally said. "You want to talk to me about that dinner, don't you?"

    "I'm a little worried about some of the relationship dynamics I've been seeing between you and Yuno," Hazō admitted. "It seems to me like they're hurting both of you, and that's not something I can ignore as your friend."

    Noburi pulled himself up out of his slouch. "You don't have to sugarcoat it, Hazō. I messed up. I got lost in the moment, and I scared Yuno, and then neither of us were ready to bail Kagome out after he did his usual thing. Honestly, I should've seen it coming—it's not like I hadn't met Fujisawa at the ceremony, in an 'It's Yuno's special day, so I'm just going to pretend girls don't exist above their feet' kind of way."

    Hazō shook his head. "That's not what I was going for. I mean, yes, it would have been good if you jumped in, especially after what happened with Akane, but at the end of the day, it's the host whose job it is to keep the peace, and I didn't manage it either."

    "No," Noburi disagreed, "that's not fair. Your job in this clan is to have crazy ideas and do the paperwork. My job is to provide support. So if support doesn't get provided, that means I let you down. Just… don't blame Yuno, OK? She's doing her best."

    "I'm sure she is," Hazō said. "But her best is worrying me. Mari said Yuno's already hospitalised two people. I'm guessing they were civilians, since all hell didn't break loose, or maybe they were KEI ninja and Kei or Ami bribed them not to press charges—I can totally see Ami doing that and then adding it to the favour stockpile. Either way, we can't afford the risk of her doing it to someone who matters."

    In retrospect, Hazō really should have followed up on that at the time.

    "That's really not a comment you should be making out loud in this day and age," Noburi said.

    "I'm not saying KEI ninja don't matter," Hazō said impatiently. "I'm saying they matter a lot less than her hospitalising, say, a Hyūga or a Sarutobi. Or worse, suppose she does the most natural thing in the world and hospitalises a Hagoromo. Within an hour, Hagoromo Ritsuo will be at the Tower, telling Asuma that the Gōketsu have violated the Hokage's decree and spilled blood in a clan war. If that happens, the Gōketsu are sunk. Letting us off with a fine won't be an option."

    "All right," Noburi conceded, "when you put it that way, maybe things aren't so great. But it's really not her fault. She's just scared. She thinks that the second I get close enough to a girl to be able to compare, I'll realise how awful Yuno is and abandon her. She doesn't even think of it in terms of my agency—girls are automatically drawn to me because of my awesomeness, which is fair, and I am automatically going to choose the best available option, which she thinks isn't her, because that's how relationships work.

    "It's not like she's unaware that getting all homicidal at the drop of a hat is only more likely to push me away and into the arms of emotionally-stable competition. But she's a fighter. If she's doomed anyway, she's going to delay the inevitable as much as she can instead of sitting back and letting it happen. And as someone who's grown up with violence as her only problem-solving tool, what else is she going to do?"

    Hazō nodded. "And what do you think?"

    "I'm not going to cheat on her, whatever she may think," Noburi said. "I have a will of iron plus basic human decency. The thing is…"

    Noburi hesitated.

    "Never mind."

    "You can talk to me," Hazō said. "Remember, I was stupid enough to make the most patient, tolerant girl in the world break up with me once. I'm not going to judge you."

    "…Yeah," Noburi said eventually. "Fine. But this is just between you and me, all right?"

    "Of course."

    Noburi took a deep breath.

    "It's not like she's exactly wrong."

    "What do you mean?" Hazō asked, preparing himself to be as non-judgemental as possible.

    "I would never do anything to hurt Yuno," Noburi said. "You know that."

    Hazō nodded.

    "But it's a fact that I got married young. I went straight from girls acting like I was some kind of slug to being in a political marriage—which, by miracle, happened to be with someone I already had feelings for. So here I am with this hard-won manly body, and this confidence, and my natural charisma polished until it glows, and it's all for nothing. I'm never going to date anyone. I'm never going to flirt with anyone. I'm at the destination, but I never got to make the journey.

    "Yuno's worth it. Of course she is. But it's not like I can get some tweezers from the hospital and just pull out this part of my heart and throw it away so I can be a better husband. The worst part is, with her razor-sharp intuition, I'm pretty sure she knows, and because she knows, there is absolutely nothing I can say to convince her that she is safe and secure and I will never end up interested in another girl. And once I do end up interested in another girl, in Yuno's mind it's a fact that I'll choose her over Yuno. I can't blame her for wanting to eliminate the competition in advance."

    Hazō was starting to wonder if he'd bitten off more than he could chew. For Kei, the family's other radical pessimist, it had taken a miracle of compatibility with an utterly devoted partner who was lacking in sources of temptation before she could feel secure in her relationship. Noburi met one of those conditions at most, and while Kei would probably respond to cheating by spiralling down into a deep well of self-loathing, if Yuno ever sincerely believed that Noburi had cheated on her, there would be blood.

    "Have you talked to her about any of this?"

    "Yes and no," Noburi said. "I've tried, but I don't want to hurt her, and she's a lot more self-conscious than she lets on. She's afraid that the more time I have to spend reassuring her, the more she'll put me off and make me want to go for an emotionally-secure girl instead. Ugh. Maybe if I had more dating experience under my belt—or any dating experience—I'd know what to do at a time like this."

    "Have you considered getting someone else involved?" Hazō asked.

    "Are you kidding?" Noburi exclaimed. "Satsuko would kill me before the words left my mouth! Closely followed by the person I suggested dating."

    "Nonono, I mean to help you talk things through," Hazō said. "An independent third party with more experience."

    "Like who?"

    "I wish I could say Mari," Hazō said, "because she'd be ideal for the job, but I'm guessing Yuno wouldn't be too sanguine about that."

    Noburi shook his head without further comment.

    "What about Yūhi Kurenai, then? She's got the same kind of skills, she's discreet, and she's very taken. I'm sure even Yuno wouldn't suspect you of cheating with the Hokage's fiancée."

    "…probably?" Noburi said. "But the idea of this random jōnin neither of us are connected to sticking her nose in our marriage just feels weird. Also, I worry that it'll make Yuno feel like she's so hard to deal with that I've given up on doing it myself and brought in an expert."

    "In that case, what about Ma and Pa Toad? You're on good terms with them, and they're a couple with their own marriage experience, so you could say you brought them in for some friendly advice—which is essentially true."

    "I'm a little scared of the idea of ending up with a marriage that looks like their marriage," Noburi said with a small smirk which quickly disappeared. "More of an issue is that I don't see myself summoning either of them anytime soon, never mind both. The reports say Jiraiya picked them over the Toad Boss at Nagi Island, which says to me that, despite acting like a wrinkly little comedy act all the time, those two have got to be crazy powerful."

    "What about somebody closer to home, like Akane's parents? Or maybe Honoka's?"

    Noburi considered. "Honestly, I don't know Akane's parents all that well, though they do have the advantage of definitely being outside my strike zone. I barely know Honoka's. But I'm starting to see how this might work. We just need somebody Yuno really trusts. Trouble is, the people she trusts most are Akane and Kei, and I don't want to put another burden on Akane's shoulders right now, and the idea of going to Kei for relationship advice is, uh…"

    "You say that," Hazō replied, "but given the size of the Kittensphere, she must have had to deal with jealousy issues a whole bunch of times by now, and as far as I know there haven't been any casualties—though, now I think about it, I haven't seen Shiori around for a while."

    "I'm sorry, the what?"

    "Oh, right, the Kittensphere. Shikamaru told me to call it that to annoy Kei."

    "Don't even think about it," Noburi said. "I've got enough on my plate without having to succeed you as clan head. I will talk to her, though—now I think about it, there's got to be some way to exploit her religious authority for the greater good. And maybe Mari, who's a goddess of romance in her own right."

    "Just don't say that around Yuno."

    Noburi sighed.

    "There's one more thing," Hazō said. "I don't want to harp on about the Fujisawa incident, but back then, Yuno stopped you from reading Fujisawa's note. In effect, she silenced a guest. The Gōketsu are all about communication and talking things out—I think you get that better than anyone—and if Yuno hasn't internalised that yet, then it's a matter of priority for us to explain it to her. Do you have any thoughts on how?"

    "For what it's worth," Noburi said, "she does feel guilty about that. Fujisawa's a good friend of hers. I think she'll apologise to her eventually, once she can find a natural way of saying 'I thought my husband was going to cheat on me with you even though he didn't do anything wrong at all except maybe stare at you for too long just because you happen to be gorgeous'."

    "A word to the wise," Hazō said after a second, "when you go to consult Kei, maybe don't tell her you think her new girlfriend is gorgeous."

    "I'm not stupid, Hazō. One homicidally jealous woman is enough for all my daily needs. Although, now I think of it, I don't know if Kei gets homicidally jealous. It's never come up."

    "There was that initial period when everyone was attracted to Mari, and she didn't kill any of us," Hazō observed, "so I suppose there's a chance you'll be all right. Just make sure you leave me your RPG sourcebooks in your will before you go out."

    "Rule one of not being assassinated," Noburi countered, "do not give people incentive to assassinate you. You can have those sourcebooks over my dead body."

    "Yeah," Hazō agreed, "that's the idea."

    Noburi groaned. "Anyway," he said, "maybe you and I can explain it to her together later. This definitely sounds like a place to use your clan head authority—which she respects a lot, actually, almost as if you managed to build a prosperous clan with a healthy internal culture while being two years younger than her. Now I think of it, at some point I'd better explain to her that you're a figurehead and it was the rest of us that did most of the work. Wouldn't want her getting the wrong idea."

    "Shut up, Noburi."

    Noburi laughed.

    "You've got to remember," he said more seriously, "nobody cared what Yuno thought back in Isan, so they didn't exactly go out of their way to teach her communication skills. It's not like she's stupid or has built-in issues with expressing herself the way Kei's girls do. It's just a matter of getting her to build the habit, same way as the rest of us. Also, if we can make her feel listened to, that'll help her appreciate that this is a clan where we listen to each other, so maybe you should try and think of some issues on which you really want her opinion."

    "That makes sense," Hazō said. "Want to head back?"

    Noburi levered himself upright reluctantly. "I guess we'd better. That afternoon shift won't man itself."

    As they got up and began to get their bearings, a thought occurred to Hazō.

    "Speaking of weird medical stuff, your Akimichi chakra training finished the other day, didn't it? How does it feel?"

    Noburi shrugged. "It doesn't, really, most of the time. Like, when I have my barrel on, I don't notice any difference at all. It's a drop in the ocean. But then if I try going without the barrel… it gets really weird. It's like having this massive cavern somewhere inside me, only at the same time I know it's really tiny, and if I try to move my chakra around at all, it goes empty in a flash. I wonder if it's how civilian kids feel when they first develop chakra reserves."

    Hazō nodded. "How do you feel about the next step, learning the Shadow Clone Technique?"

    "Still a little anxious," Noburi admitted. "I mean, now that we've made it this far, it's probably going to be fine, but I can't rule out the chances of something really freaky happening because of bloodline interactions or whatever. Hey, speaking of which, did you hear about the thing with Snowflake and Dr Yakushi?"

    "Don't tell me the Kittensphere's expanded again already!" Hazō exclaimed.

    "No, seriously, I won't be responsible for the consequences if you keep calling it that," Noburi said. "I'd be fine with having Dr Yakushi as brother-in-law by metaphysical extension—the guy's awesome—but I was actually talking about the latest 'research' he's published in order to fix Snowflake being a living OPSEC crisis. Turns out that the Second Hokage designed the Shadow Clone Technique specifically around the true bloodlines of the Sage's descendants, i.e. the Leaf clans, and if anybody with a non-Leaf Bloodline Limit tries to use it, the consequences will be unpredictable and potentially fatal."

    Hazō nodded. "So Snowflake's memory stuff is a consequence of the Frozen Skein being a non-Leaf Bloodline Limit, not a built-in feature."

    "Yeah. Also, it means there's a very good reason for foreign Bloodline Limit ninja not to try and steal it, which is going to be a big deal if AMITY stops people just declaring war in retaliation for technique theft."

    "Of course," Hazō noted, "that's going to make it look weird when you decide to learn the Shadow Clone Technique."

    "Yeah. I suppose Snowflake decided she couldn't afford to wait any longer for damage control."

    "Speaking of which," Hazō said, "do you have any ideas on how we're going to get you the Shadow Clone Technique?"

    "Sure," Noburi said. "I can't just go up to the Hokage and ask for it. You guys got it because of a major emergency, but I don't see the Hokage being in a hurry to hand it to me while there are still jōnin with years and years of loyal service who don't qualify. I thought about arguing that I need it for Zoo Rushes, which are a thing only I can do, but if AMITY works out, we won't have any targets big enough to need one for a while to come—and also the Hokage would probably say that Zoo Rushes work fine with my reserves as they are. Let's face it, he is not going to want to give the Gōketsu extra power if he can help it.

    "That's where I had my idea. Dr Yakushi and Orochimaru are still pretty interested in my Bloodline Limit. If I'm prepared to make Orochimaru even more interested in vivisecting me, I could get them to push for it for the sake of their research—seeing how the Vampiric Dew interacts with the Shadow Clone Technique and such."

    "Yeah, I'm sure Asuma would—"

    Hazō: Empathy 21 - 9 = 12 vs TN ??

    "—go along with that if you pitched it right," Hazō said. "Good idea, Noburi."

    "No problem," Noburi said. "Now come on, let's get you back in time for your date."

    -o-​

    You have received 3 + 1 (Brevity) + 1 (Fun-to-Write) = 5 XP and 1 FP (standard refresh).

    -o-​

    What do you do?

    Voting closes on
     
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    • Chapter 515: Just Hold On; We're On Our Way
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    • Naruto opened the door and blinked in surprise.

    "What do you two want?" he demanded.

    "A few minutes of your time," Mari said with an easy smile. "We're working on a very unusual project and you'll either be super excited about it or you'll laugh in our faces. Either way, I'm confident you won't regret talking to us."

    Hazō noted with pleasure that she had said 'we are working on...' The truth was more nuanced; it had taken him an hour to beat down all of her objections and bring her around from 'this is the craziest idea you have ever had and that's saying something' to 'okay, but it still won't work' to 'well...I guess it's worth a shot.' Whether she now considered it to be we who was working on it or whether she was simply trying to show a united front for Naruto's benefit, he wasn't too bothered.

    Naruto stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. He conjured a clone and immediately dispelled it, then opened the door the rest of the way and gestured them inside.

    Mari settled on the old couch opposite the door, elbows on her knees and fingers interlaced. She locked eyes with Naruto, not looking over as Hazō settled silently beside her.

    "How would you—oh, thank you," she said, as a Naruto brought a tray of three teacups into the room and set them on the low table between Naruto and the two Gōketsu. She selected one and took a sip, then nodded in gratitude. Naruto and Hazō each chose their own and raised them in salute.

    "We want your help," Mari said, a small smile on her face, "with a crazy, far-out plan that almost certainly won't work but it's a first step."

    Naruto raised an eyebrow and leaned back, one arm up on the back of the couch, and crossed his legs with right ankle on left knee. "Gosh. How could I possibly refuse such an intriguing and reasonable pitch?"

    "It will take about five minutes of your time," Hazō said. "All you have to do is punch me in the face, psychically."

    "...Punch you in the face, psychically?"

    "You have high-level security clearance," Mari said. "You've undoubtedly seen the report about Hazō's encounter with Itachi and Hidan on O'uzu Island. Specifically the part about how Hazō was attacked by a ninja named Daizen and a seal failure killed Daizen and opened a rift in space?"

    "Sure. What about it?"

    "Did you see the part about how Daizen appeared on the other side of the rift and Hazō pulled him out of there?"

    A shadow of doubt flickered across Naruto's face and he uncrossed his legs, sitting up straight again. "What about it?"

    "I think that was the Pure Lands," Hazō said. "Daizen proves that it's possible to bring people back. People like Jiraiya. And the Third, and the Fourth."

    Doubt shifted towards anger. "You're kidding, right?"

    Mari shook her head. "Look, this idea almost certainly won't work. Bringing people back from the dead isn't like rescuing them from enemy territory, and I personally thought this was nuts until last night." She chuckled. "I still kinda do, actually, but I'm wavering."

    "What happened last night?" Naruto asked.

    "Hazō sat me down and talked to me about it." She glanced over at her adopted son, fond amusement in her eyes. "He's convincing when he's passionate about something. I went from thinking 'that's crazy' to 'okay, not crazy but still ridiculous', to 'well, ridiculous but it wouldn't hurt to try' in the span of an hour." She shrugged, gesturing casually with the hand that held her teacup. "We live in a world of magic. Ninja conjure the elemental powers with a word and a gesture—we even named our nations for our ability to do that. In addition, there are the non-elemental jutsu that touch on souls—your Shadow Clones, according to rumor, are fragments of your soul that you send forth. The Yamanaka jutsu obviously involve sending a part of their souls out of their body, which is why the user collapses. Souls are real, beyond question."

    "This conversation definitely isn't going down strange and vaguely disturbing paths," Naruto said wryly.

    "There are thousands of stories and legends about ghosts coming back," Mari said, not dignifying his comment with a response. "People speaking with those who have passed on, the dead walking the earth. Shoot, forget legends. We've seen people come back from the dead in the last year. Hazō literally pulled someone out of there and Orochimaru came back after being blown to specks." She shrugged. "Of course, maybe he didn't really die. Maybe the Snake Sannin had some way to survive. Maybe he reverse-summoned away while still in the form of a thousand snakes. Maybe he somehow burrowed away from the blast that scooped out a crater three feet deep and compacted the dirt like concrete."

    Hazō noticed as Naruto noticed how Mari had carefully not mentioned the other seven people who had been resurrected that day.

    "Okay," the blond said. "So. Resurrection isn't a pipe dream." The words were light, the same tone that you used when a child insisted that their imaginary friend was real. "Where do I come in?"

    Mari turned to Hazō and nodded for him to take over.

    "I've experienced a lot of jōnin auras," Hazō said. "They are clearly metaphysical, something beyond normal reality. So are the parts from the Dragon that I helped kill. I want to surround myself with things that connect to Jiraiya and then jolt my mind a little outside of normal reality in hopes of seeing where his soul is. I want you to do that by blasting me with your aura. You have a close connection to him and it's possible that will help." He shrugged. "We're working completely blind here, throwing stuff at the wall to see what works. As Mari said, the most likely outcome is that nothing happens, we wasted an hour, and I've got to figure out the next option while dealing with a really bad headache. But, if it does work..."

    Naruto snorted. "You seriously think that you can just randomly see into the afterlife like you're...I dunno, peeping at the baths?"

    "Ooh, good idea," Hazō said, eyebrows rising. "We should do this near the women's baths. It's a location that was significant to Jiraiya."

    Mari's smile became somewhat forced.

    Naruto stared in disbelief for a moment, then started laughing. "Gōketsu, I knew you were...but..." He shook his head, smothering the last chuckles. "Look, you don't seriously believe this stuff, do you? Talking to the dead is bedtime stories and fables."

    "Daizen," Mari said.

    Naruto's lips tightened. "We have no idea what that was. There was a seal failure so all bets are off as to what happened."

    She shrugged. "Sure. Still, what do we know? Seal failures are usually confined to a small area." She carefully did not look over at Hazō, who carefully did not correct her. "This was a portal in midair leading to a very large, open space. A vast ocean, trees that stretched out of sight. A person who had died moments earlier appeared in midair and fell into the ocean. He died again and the whole thing looped. Hazō was able to physically walk in and physically carry him out, but when Hazō went on his research trip to the rift site, Motokazu said there was still a body in the lava." She tossed one hand. "Well, specifically he said that there was a depression in the ground shaped like a person, into which the lava had flowed before burning the body to ash."

    "So, just to be clear," Naruto said, "there wasn't a body and you've decided that the most probable explanation is that Daizen's body was destroyed and a portal to the afterlife was formed, at which location he reincarnated into a brand new body. That, as opposed to, say, the rift led to the Seventh Path and Daizen got transported there the way we know humans can do."

    Hazō shook his head. "No," he said, absolute certainty in his voice. "No human could survive the transit to the Seventh Path without a guide and the protection of a Summoning contract. Period. If you don't believe me, talk to Tsunade or Asuma. In that place, Daizen was as alive as you or I and he wasn't a gibbering madman the way he would have been if he h#d looked in7o the Ovt." He cleared his throat and focused on how it had felt when, on their most recent date, Ino had cupped his cheek in her hand and kissed him. After a moment, the world stopped glistening around him.

    Naruto rolled his eyes. "Fine, whatever. So, you're convinced that the afterlife is real and that you can send your mind through the veil of death with pinpoint precision in order to find Jiraiya. At which point you will undoubtedly pull him back with you and there will be much happiness and rejoicing."

    Hazō shook his head. "No, probably not. Well, I mean, yes, I'm convinced that the afterlife is real and I think there's a fair chance that given enough time and resources we can find a way to interact with it, and that when we eventually bring Jiraiya back there will be much happiness and rejoicing. This particular attempt? No. It's very unlikely that this will work, but you have to start somewhere." He cocked his head, considering Naruto for a moment. "What if it did? I'm going to keep working on ways to bring people back. I've decided that I've lost too many people and I'm not willing to put up with it anymore. I want my father back. I want Noburi's brother back. I want the Third back, and the Fourth. And by the Will of Fire and everything else I hold holy, I want Jiraiya back. So I'm going to keep working on this and someday I'll succeed. I'll find a way to recharge that rift and open it up again. We'll explore the land around there and see if it really is what I think it is. We'll search until we find the people we care about, and we'll bring them back to enrich our lives and strengthen Leaf. This plan that we're discussing? It's silly and cobbled together out of half-baked ideas with nothing more than intuition. It's wildly unlikely that it will work...but what if it did? What if we didn't try this because it seemed silly and twenty years from now, after we get the rift open and search Jiraiya out, we discover that it would have been enough?"

    "You can't be serious."

    Mari turned one hand slightly, the motion serving to shift the jinchūriki's attention from Hazō back to herself. "We're serious enough to try it. It'll only take a few minutes, so what's the harm?"

    Naruto chuckled and shook his head. "Sure, whatever. I'll come along and watch but I can't do what you're asking. I've never been able to do that soul thing that Gramps and Jiraiya and the others do. It doesn't have a lot of effect on me when they try, but I can't do it myself." He shrugged. "Gramps used to say that it came with time. Then Jiraiya would snort and make some mocking comment about how when he was a boy he would walk around throwing jōnin aura everywhere, uphill both ways and in the snow."

    Hazō and Mari looked at each other in surprise.

    "Either way, I'm still delighted that you want to watch," Hazō said, smiling. "Having you there might help."

    "Eh. Mostly I want to see her turn your brain into pudding. That's gonna be funny."

    "You and Noburi really need to spend more time together," Mari said. "You'd get along great."

    o-o-o-o​

    Hazō took a final slow, centering breath.

    His chakra was calm.

    His body was calm.

    His mind was calm.

    He had bathed. He had meditated. He had sucked, briefly and carefully, on a small fragment of Canabisu's mellow candy in order to disconnect a few of the anchor cables that bound his body to the world.

    He had sat and gazed upon the Dragon scales for ten minutes, letting their antithetical nature scrape away more of his connections to reality.

    He had dressed himself in the most appropriate clothes and taken his place at the center of the ritual.

    He had, again, meditated. And now he was ready.

    The sound of the women's baths drifted past, a thing to be noted but not observed. (The memory of Mari hiring six lovely young ladies to 'go have a naked suds fight in the baths, and be sure to giggle a lot' was not permitted to break his serenity.)

    He permitted his eyes to open and categorize his surroundings.

    He sat in the center of a pentagram. Why a pentagram? Why not? It had a pleasing set of metaphor to it—five spikes, one for each of the elemental natures that Jiraiya had wielded in war. Five triangles, the sides of which stood for the Kage, the clans, and the civilians of each of those nations with whom the Toad Sage had warred and peaced. A pentagon, the spikes of war facing protectively outwards and not threatening that which lay within. The boundary of Leaf was not a perfect pentagon, but it was close. Many of Jiraiya's seals used pentagons as their enclosure. Why? Hazō intended to ask; pentagons weren't as physically robust as a triangle, nor were they easy to draw accurately. Yet, somehow, the quirky sage had chosen them.

    Hazō looked down at the bloodstained and oversized clothes he wore. He kept trying to remember Jiraiya's scent and feeling it slip away, but he imagined that it was soaked into the fabric of these bloody clothes, stored for decades in a forgotten laundry seal.

    He looked up, pivoting his head to review the objects at each point of the pentagram.

    A bowl of oil with a blazing wick from which coiled a thin trail of sooty smoke. The Will of Fire.

    The first seal of Jiraiya's pedagogical method. The distilled essence of Jiraiya's belief in the future.

    The first Icha-Icha book—not the first one published, the first one that had ever been execrably written for the sheer pleasure of creation by a teenage boy who had not yet thought to turn his passion into the control device of assassins and spies.

    A charcoal and colored-wax sketch of three painfully young teens mugging for the artist while their amused and barely middle-aged sensei stood behind them. It was waterstained and half-blurred from when Jiraiya's first apartment flooded.

    A plain wooden box. Hazō had carried it around to dozens of elders, asking each of them to whisper a memory of Jiraiya into the box. Tiny pieces of happiness, joy, nostalgia, and grief bounced around in the tightly-closed container.

    To his left rear, kneeling seiza outside the pentagram: Noburi. The little brother Hazō had never known he wanted to wrestle with, mock and be mocked by, fight beside. The one who had given Jiraiya cookies and been named his favorite child.

    To his right rear, kneeling seiza outside the pentagram: Naruto. The godson on whom Jiraiya had doted. The hero that he had trained to preserve Leaf against the day that the Toad Sage no longer could.

    To his left front, squatting on his haunches: Gamasid. Jiraiya's original contact on the Seventh Path, the one who had carried him back to meet the Toad Boss when he first signed the contract.

    To his right front, the ancient, battered, battle-scarred, half-melted forehead protector. The ashes, undoubtedly those of Jiraiya and his traitorous student/murderess admixed, had very deliberately not been wiped away save for one spot at the very center of what had once been the seal of Leaf.

    To his front, Mari. Wrapped in the never-before worn wedding dress that had been in her closet since Jiraiya left for the Chūnin Exams the first time. Her hair was wavy from a quick and not-yet-dried wash in the women's baths where the giggling and suds battling were ongoing.

    She stacked her hands and raised an eyebrow. Last chance to back out.

    Hazō stared her in the eyes and nodded. Never. Do it.

    She nodded and allowed her soul to erupt.

    In the instant before the world became fire and pain, Hazō enacted the one final preparation that he had not and would never tell anyone about: Within the depths of his mind, he whispered a prayer to the mad god Jashin, Lord of Death and Sex. Lord Jashin, if you're there...please help this work. He is an excellent killer, a sex fiend, and I miss him.

    Mari's soul shrieked through Hazō's eyes and drenched the inside of his skull with boiling pitch. He could smell his eyeballs expanding in their sockets, could almost taste them sizzling with a sound like torn muscles and bitter copper. His head went back, his whole body locking tight in agony the only thing that kept him from screaming.

    He allowed himself to fall backwards, the sky whirling as his poorly-anchored and off-kilter mind divorced itself from reality and fled from the pain.

    The world shattered around him.

    Tiny tongues of lakewater lapped at the white-sand shore

    The sand compacted under the weight of a naked foot

    The man raced forward and leapt, white hair flaring around himself as he landed into a squat and dropped back onto his hands, kicking up with both legs. The tattered rags of Leaf battledress rustled around him

    "Jiraiya?"​

    His arms did not support him; he tumbled gracelessly to the ground

    "Damnit, Jiraiya," he grumbled. "You know better than that. Do it again."

    "Jiraiya, it's me! Can you hear me?"​

    "But sensei," he whined, his voice suddenly high and juvenile. "It's not faaaair! How am I supposed to do the Frog Smash with no chakra?"

    "Stop calling it that, you snotty tadpole!" he said, voice now sharply feminine. "It's the Toad Thrust, not the Frog Smash! And how come the old coot gets to be 'sensei' and I don't, huh?"

    "Jiraiya, we're coming! Just hold on! We're coming to get you and bring you back!"​

    "Old coot? Don't you disrespect me, you old bat! Don't you... Don't you..."

    He frowned and sat back, shaking his head. "...you old bat? Don't you... Don't you... C'mon, c'mon... Ha! Don't you dare call me that, Little Miss!" His face lit up in delight at the memory. He leapt to his feet, cackling and capering. "Hah! Little Miss, Little Miss, Little Miss! And then she took the stick! I remember!" He thrust both fists at the uncaring grey sky. "I remember! I am Jiraiya of the Sannin! Student of Sarutobi Hiruzen, God of Shinobi! Battle-brother to Orochimaru of the Snakes and Tsunade of the Slugs! Born of no family, begrudged the Matron's roof, feared by braggarts and bullies! Master of the Frog Kata! Sage of the Toad Clan! Fifth Hokage and patriarch of Gōketsu! Husband of Mari, father of Keiko, Noburi, and Hazō! I am Jiraiya the Great, and you will not have me, because I remember!"









    Author's Note: Hazō has taken a Mild Mental Consequence from Mari aura blasting him. I don't need to roll for it; she can beat his defenses and she can choose not to do more damage than she wants.

    This update covered 1 day. One of Hazō's Shadow Clones did seal prep for MARS and four more read Orochimaru's sealing notes for the XP. No actual sealing was done.

    I'm keeping it time-constrained because I'm unclear on where we stand on the AMITY timer and I don't want to jump over something and have to make the timeline wonky again.

    XP AWARD: 5

    Brevity XP: 1

    "GM had fun" XP: 2
    • +1 for scene: Important conversation with Naruto
    • +1 for scene: Necromancy


    It is now just after sundown.

    Vote time! What to do now?

    Voting ends on Wednesday, .
     
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    • Chapter 516: Anchoring the Sun
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    • Tanzaku Gai was more than just a city. Of all the sites of strategic importance in the Fire Country, it had received the best defences during the war short of Leaf itself, and Hazō thought he understood why. It wasn't the bountiful tax income. It wasn't the key role in governance over western Fire. It was, to put it simply, morale. Tanzaku Gai was where Leaf ninja went when off-duty (despite attempts at competition from the newer Otafuku Gai). It was where they went to be reminded, perhaps without ever realising it, what they were truly fighting for. The unseen desire that lay at the bottom of every ninja's heart, Hazō believed, wasn't mere survival. It wasn't hatred or revenge. It wasn't even the resolve to protect their loved ones, which Leaf tried to monopolise as the Will of Fire. It was a dream of paradise: a world without war. In Tanzaku Gai, for just a few hours at a time, there was no war. There was no conflict beyond the petty strife inextricable from human society. There was art, and music, and fashion, and fine cuisine, and every other joy that humanity was capable of crafting for itself when its hands weren't busy holding weapons.

    Today, Hazō and Akane were beneficiaries of this tradition of fiercely-protected peace. The flowers at the Nishūrasen Gardens were in full bloom, their panoply of colours eclipsing even the famous fountains in Hazō's eyes—though, of course, still failing to eclipse Akane as she pointed them out to him one by one, unselfconsciously showing off both the knowledge she'd picked up from Ino and the additional research she'd conducted because when Akane committed herself to taking care of a living being, that living being got taken care of.

    Speaking of Ino, she was the one responsible for the vibrant green (but not that green) one-piece dress Akane was wearing, and the story behind that was a valuable reminder just how terrifying a social spec could be even without being animated by unholy powers of chaos or being broken until talent filled the space where her heart had been.

    As soon as word came in that the Fourth Shinobi World War was over, details pending, the overworked, overstressed Yamanaka clan head had seized the opportunity not merely to relax and unwind, but to unleash a diabolical plot that must have been in the making for months at least. First, the easy part, she took advantage of Snowflake's curiosity and desire for self-definition to invite her to a grand clothes shopping trip. Then, she broke down Kei's resistance by pointing out that anything Snowflake wore would reflect on Kei, and thus also on the Nara, whether she liked it or not, and if she didn't serve as chaperone and veto holder, Ino had no interest in being responsible for the consequences. As a follow-up attack, she persuaded Kei to invite Fujisawa, promising her the family bonding opportunity that they'd missed out on with the unfortunate dinner. With that excuse, and with the momentum rolling, Akane found it too hard to say no, and was dragged out of the room where she'd been spending too much of her time and into the spring sunlight. Meanwhile, Tenten (according to Akane's speculations after the fact) couldn't let the new, more exciting, more outgoing, more communicative mute girlfriend outshine her even visually, and insisted on joining in despite her usual lack of interest. And then, Ino put the strawberry on the cake. Hinata had limited her interactions with her political opponents since assuming the Hyūga throne, but even she couldn't resist the triple temptation of observing complex multi-layered social dynamics (the Kittensphere members alone would provide a day's worth of utterly unique data, and also Hazō really needed to heed Noburi's warning and stop using that name before it was too late), influencing the personal lives of her peers and rivals while their guards were down, and getting to be part of a gaggle of teenage girls shopping for pretty things.

    Hazō had no idea where to begin closing the gap with Hinata on a more than superficial level. Even Ami, despite apparent interest, had yet to attempt the challenge (as far as he knew). And now Ino had done it, just like that, without spending capital or discomforting her allies or attempting manipulation that might backfire if Hinata saw through it. If Ino, even more calculating than he'd realised, succeeded in turning the Leaf Chūnin Girls No-Holds-Barred Shopping Spree into a regular event, he couldn't imagine the potential uses she could make of such a tool. (He wasn't sure why the rank was specified, or what would happen if they got promoted at different rates, but he did note that it excluded Ami and Mari.)

    Locked out of the process though he was by virtue of not being a chūnin girl, Hazō couldn't complain if it involved the girls in his life being both happier and easier on the eyes, and it was a fact that Akane looked magnificent in green.

    The fourth compliment to that effect later, Hazō decided that it was time to try a conversation of a more serious nature, and led her inside one of the garden's infamous replica gazebos.

    "Speaking of mood-enhancing aromatherapy," he smoothly segued from her last flower description, "how are you feeling? I've been finding you a little hard to read lately."

    "How?" Akane echoed. "You mean the whole mass murderer thing?"

    Hazō had taken time to prepare for this conversation, mostly pondering all the ways in which he could mess it up, and therefore he was careful to say absolutely nothing to this question.

    Akane sat in silence for a few seconds, looking out at the flowers.

    "A lot of the time, I haven't been feeling anything at all," she said quietly. "Not like the person I thought I was. No, just… not like a person.

    "I told you once that I felt hollow. Just an imitation of whichever person I looked up to most at any given time. I thought that, with you there to support me, I could find some kind of truth, like maybe there was some kind of core Akane that I simply couldn't see because I was too busy living a borrowed way of life.

    "I didn't make it in time."

    Akane looked at him, but he didn't say anything. There was a 99% chance that whatever he said would be the wrong thing, and she seemed… fragile. Too fragile for Gōketsu Akane.

    "You wouldn't have compromised your ideals under pressure. If someone told you to kill thousands of civilians just because they belonged to the other side, you'd have fought back, or delayed until you could come up with some kind of brilliant solution, or even gone missing. But I'm just your shadow. I'm not real, and my Youth isn't real, and while you shine when you're in the dark, I disappear. I thought I'd faced up to that, but all I'd done was pretend, and it got thousands of people killed.

    "Kei says that I should take the time to process my pain instead of looking for another mask to hide behind. Noburi says that I should be kind to myself, and that beating myself up will only make it harder to find the answers. Mari says that carrying out terrible orders is a trial every ninja has to face eventually, and finding my own way to cope will make me stronger as a person. Kagome doesn't say anything, but he gets this odd, distant look in his eyes, and then he goes off to make me soup.

    "I love them all, but they can't offer me a way forward. Nobody can. How do you go anywhere when it turns out your moral compass doesn't have a lodestone?"

    "It's funny," Hazō said when it became apparent that Akane didn't have anything else to say. "I thought it seemed like you'd lost your anchor, and your metaphor is you not having a compass."

    Wait, no. Ship metaphors. Hazō did not want to use ship metaphors when talking about guilt for killing civilians. There was no way bringing back that memory wouldn't make things worse.

    Fortunately, Akane didn't seem to notice.

    "I thought Youth was my anchor," she said. "But as soon as the tide came, I got swept away, and found out I'd never had an anchor at all. It's like Kei said—I was always mass murderer Akane waiting to happen."

    Kei said what?! Hazō was going to—

    No, he probably shouldn't. As someone who'd been frustrated at the clan's apparent inability to keep themselves together without his intervention, the last thing he should do was object when they actually made an effort to look out for each other. If Kei turned around and said, "Well, you handle it, then", he'd be back all the way to square minus one. He just hoped she wasn't making things worse.

    Or was he qualified to judge that, given that he had no idea how to make things better himself?

    Wasn't there anything he could do, any approach he could make that had a chance of helping Akane without risking disaster?

    Maybe there was.

    "You've been one of my biggest anchors for the longest time," Hazō said. "But you've never been my only one. That's not something you can ask of any one person, and maybe you can't ask it of one ideal either. You know how I feel about Uplift, but I want to believe that even if I woke up one day and found out Uplift was a lie, I'd still have other reasons to carry on—you being one of them. What about you, Akane? Do you have any other anchors?"

    No, wait. That really sounded like he was pressuring her to reciprocate and say he was one of hers. Damn.

    Akane just looked out at the flower beds for a while, and he couldn't tell if she was thinking or staring into space.

    "There are still people I love," she said, "and things I care about. Of course there are. But what's going to happen when the tide comes again? If my love of Youth was a lie all along, then how can I believe in my love for you, or Ino, or my parents, or anyone, never mind something as abstract as Uplift? How can I know that they aren't more illusions that will vanish if the world pokes at them hard enough?"

    Hazō had made a precommitment not to try to fix anything, and on the inside, he was grinding his teeth in frustration at the inflexibility of his past self. If past!Hazō had known what it would be like to hear Akane say these things, surely he'd have changed his mind and given his future self carte blanche to do something, anything, to make things better for her.

    Unfortunately, Hazō believed in the power of precommitment. It was a mighty tool, powerful enough to defend even against Ami, but it demanded faithfulness. If he turned his back on it even once, it might lose too much power to save him next time past!Hazō's forethought was the only thing standing between him and lethal foot-in-mouth poisoning.

    "Akane," he said, "I can't look into your heart and see how real any of your feelings are." He'd put it on the sealing research list, but he should probably finish the cure for wandering wits first. "But I can ask you this: what makes life worthwhile for you? You don't need to know whether your feelings are real to be able to answer that. You don't even have to limit yourself to what's realistic. Pretend for a second that there are no justifications and no consequences. What do you want to do?"

    "What do I… want to do?"

    "It's OK if you don't have any answers," Hazō added hastily, "or if it's something really vague. I'm not trying to put you on the spot here."

    "I want to make a better Akane," Akane said slowly. "One who won't murder thousands of civilians when she's ordered. One who has the right beliefs and stands by them. One who isn't anyone's shadow. I want… instead of an Akane who's always standing in the light, I want one who can step into the darkness without disappearing." She gave the strange, ironic smile of someone enjoying a private joke at her own expense.

    "I don't know what anchors that Akane would have, or what would make her life worthwhile. I suppose she'd be a very different person from me."

    Hazō forcefully suppressed the desire to argue. Instead, he smiled. "I have no idea how to make any of that happen. Honestly, from where I'm standing, the idea of improving on you would be blasphemous if it wasn't incoherent, but I admit I may be slightly biased. But that doesn't change the fact that I love you and believe in you absolutely, and if there's anything I can do to help you, anything at all, then I will do that thing."

    Hazō had a sense that if he let Akane think about it, she'd say something to the effect of "But it's only a hypothetical and I've already said it can't happen", so he hurried on. He'd suspected that this topic might leave Akane feeling melancholy, which was not acceptable on a date with Gōketsu Hazō, master of seduction, so he'd made sure to have a secret weapon close to hand.

    "By the way," he said, "I wrote you something."

    Akane's curiosity quickly overcame her desire to stare wistfully into the distance. Just as planned.

    "What's that?"

    Hazō pulled out a scroll. "I've secretly been studying the work of Namikaze Minato, some say the greatest poet of our age, in order to compose the finest love poem in Elemental Nations history. Listen and be amazed."

    Akane straightened up into the rapt listening posture of an ideal Academy student, nearly brushing her shoulder against one of the gazebo's realistically-carved fangs.

    Hazō cleared his throat.

    "To my radiant star, whose embrace
    Brings fierce blushes to my face,
    Whose amber eyes' refulgent glow
    Strikes harder than a Strong Fist blow,
    The gentle strength of whose caress
    Would shame an Arachnid Empress,
    Yes, you, Akane, are the one,
    As bright and round as the sun!"

    By the time Hazō reached the fourth stanza, dedicated to the beauty of Akane's toenails, she was so moved that her face was buried in her hands, and her shoulders were shaking with what could only be suppressed sobs of joy. Hazō made a note to do something nice for Naruto, whose father had turned out to be every bit the romantic genius he'd hoped.

    -o-​

    You have received 4 + 1 (Brevity) + 1 (Fun-to-write) = 6 XP.

    -o-​

    Ami-style training was unsuccessful due to lack of challenge: the jōnin currently in Leaf were insufficiently paranoid (by the standards of Kagome-sensei's star pupil) and just told Hazō their favourite colour when he asked; for those out on missions, their families or known friends were happy to do so.

    -o-​

    The other half of the plan is left in the merciless talons of @eaglejarl.

    Voting is closed.
     
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    • Chapter 517: Debriefing, but Not the Fun Kind
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    • April 17, the evening after the ritual and before Hazō and Akane's date

    "Okay," Naruto said. "I've been patient. Relaxed, even. Some people might use words like 'saintly'. I helped you clean up from the ritual. I helped you carry all that crap back inside. I waited patiently while dinner was prepared. Now what happened?!"

    Considering that dinner prep had consisted of everyone choosing their preferred food-containing set of storage seals, Hazō didn't feel a lot of guilt about that last point.

    "I saw something," he admitted. "I don't know if it was real, or a hallucination, and I've been going over it in my head, trying to make sure I had every detail locked down. We'll want to confirm it before acting on it, and—"

    "So help me," Naruto said, his voice flat and a ball of blue light beginning to swirl in his hand, "if you do not share the information with me in an efficient and complete manner within the next five seconds, I will tear this house down around your ears."

    "Okay, okay!" Hazō said, patting at the air in an attempt to calm down the angry jinchūriki. "Here's what I saw: a white beach next to a big lake. There were trees on the far side, stretching around two-thirds of the lake's perimeter, but the near side was grassy and backed up against hills. Jiraiya was exercising and practicing a weird kata that I didn't recognize. Something like this." He did his best to imitate the move but succeeded only in falling on his butt.

    Naruto blinked and the incipient Rasengan disappeared. "Two-footed thrust kick powered off a jump, aimed at the thighs and catching yourself on your arms before back-rolling?"

    "Yeah," Hazō said, climbing to his feet and dusting off his butt. "Exactly. Except he spraddled out instead of rolling."

    "That's the Toad Thrust. It's part of the martial art of the Toads. Unc always called it the 'Frog Kata' and that move the 'Frog Smash' because it drove Ma and Pa—that's Shima and Fukasaku—crazy." He paused, thinking. "You could have seen him practicing it before he died. He might even have tried to teach it to you." The moment he spoke the final words he looked dubious as Hazō's complete failure came to mind.

    "I could have, but I didn't. He was talking to himself, trying to remind himself of something. He said, 'Damnit, Jiraiya. You know better than that. Do it again.'" Hazō ran through the rest of Jiraiya's words quickly, struggling to get them as close to exactly right as memory allowed.

    Naruto, poking thoughtfully at his ramen as Hazō spoke, stopped and looked up at the final words. "The weird part is that he fell, and that he said the bit about no chakra. That's how Ma and Pa like to teach—they think that studying while handicapped means you learn better, because you have to get the form exactly right instead of doing it a little wrong but pushing through by pumping chakra. Uncle Jiraiya hated practicing without chakra and he never did it unless they were standing over him. I could maybe see him falling if he was trying to do it without chakra again." He thought for a moment. "Also, he said 'Little Miss'? You're sure?"

    Hazō nodded. "Yes. Why?"

    Naruto snorted, then burst out into full-throated laughter. "That's what Ma and Pa's teacher used to call Shima. It drives her bonkers when anyone else uses it. Like, I called her that when I was nine and she literally kicked me from one end of the training field to the other in one go, then zipped ahead before I landed and dribbled me all the way back. Cracked six ribs and I was black and blue for a week."

    Hazō paused to reflect on the idea that the two-foot toad with the purple lipstick and the frizzy hair could punt a (granted, young) jinchūriki across the length of a training field and be waiting for him when he landed.

    "So...what I'm hearing is that I should never use that name in her hearing," Noburi said, half-serious and half-joking, with a tiny bit of fear to round out the tone.

    "Yah. That."

    "Do you know this 'Frog Kata'?" Mari asked.

    "First, don't call it that around Ma and Pa if you want to live," Naruto said seriously. "Second, yes. Not at a master level, but I'm getting there. Granted, my training got interrupted by this whole kidnapping, torture, and near world-destruction thing, and now I can't continue because Unc isn't around to teach me or to summon the Sages anymore." He glanced sourly at Noburi.

    The young man in question shrugged. "I...might be able to. Dunno. It depends on how strong they are and whether or not they're willing to contract with me."

    "They're massively strong and they're proud," Naruto said. "They're not going to want to be summoned by 'some whippersnapper.'" His voice dropped into a nearly perfect copy of Fukasaku's grumpiness.

    "I could tell them it's to visit you...? And make it a one-time thing, or promise not to summon them into combat."

    "Hmm. Maybe? If you phrased it carefully they'd probably go along or else be more amused and dismissive than angry. I think."

    Noburi looked vaguely nervous at the idea of even potentially angering the two Sages.

    "The real issue is what we do now," Hazō said, pouring himself some tea. "And I mean right now, like in the next couple of hours. Naruto, you've somewhat validated the vision."

    "I wouldn't go that far," Naruto said. "You could easily have read all that in Jiraiya's journals."

    "And seen the Toad Thrust? Do you really believe that he would have diagrammed out a secret and powerful martial art, or even described it well enough to understand?"

    "...He might have."

    Hazō was both happy and frustrated at the mulish tone of the words. It showed that Naruto didn't completely believe it and was aware that he was being stubborn, but there was at least a seed of doubt.

    "Okay," Hazō said, as reasonably as he could. "Why? What would I have to gain from lying to you?" He sipped his tea and continued to ignore the honey-brushed braised sea bass that was slowly cooling on his plate.

    "You said you wanted to fix things between us," Naruto said. "This could be your idea of a clever ploy to get me on your side."

    "Is that how you grew up?" Mari asked, sympathy in her voice. "Always wondering if people were being sincere in their offers of friendship or only trying to use you?"

    Naruto looked at her, surprised.

    She nodded and poked thoughtfully at her fried rice. "I suppose it makes sense," she said, lifting an eggy bite to her lips. She tasted it consideringly, then swallowed before continuing. "Probably the most powerful jinchūriki in the world. Son of the Fourth. Student of some of the most powerful ninja in the world. Everyone wanted a piece of you, didn't they? It must have been lonely."

    "Yeah, no. Not the first time someone's tried that on me," Naruto said. "Flattery combined with understanding and sympathy, with an only-implied offer of friendship that leaves me the choice as to whether or not to reach out? Nice try."

    Mari shook her head. "You misunderstand. I have no interest in being friends with you."

    "What?" Naruto said.

    "What?" Hazō and Noburi asked in tandem.

    "Hang on, now," Hazō said. "Mari—"

    She made a cutting gesture with one hand, silencing him. "No. Being friends with Naruto is not a good plan. On good terms, absolutely. Able to work together in pursuit of common goals? Sure. Not friends. He'll be Hokage one day and we'll be under his orders. You don't befriend Kages. You do your best to have their respect and you try not to attract their attention. Getting involved in politics at that level is not worth the trouble. All that happens is you get their enemies throwing knives at your head from the darkness and their friends—if they have any left from their youth—staring suspiciously at you. Especially when there's as much of an age gap as there is between me and you, Naruto. I'd much rather be your loyal and respected jōnin who occasionally gets sent on interesting but not too dangerous intelligence-gathering missions as opposed to being your friend and confidante.

    "Mori Ami, she's closer to your age and she's not from Leaf," she continued, taking another bite of her rice and savoring it before speaking again. "She doesn't have any of the baggage that we're carrying based on being former missing-nin who Jiraiya brought in from the cold—which, to be clear, means that all the jingoistic nationalists who hate missing-nin hate us, and all the people who butted heads with Jiraiya also hate us. No desire to add your enemies to the list.

    "As to Ami...you could do worse than befriending her. She doesn't have our other issues to increase the risk and she doesn't have our place here, so she's desperate to build one. Sure, the conservatives will never trust Ami or anything she's involved in, but she's smart enough to be loyal and she'll be as honest with you as she is with anyone. She's also quite pretty and I trained her well, so she's good in the sack. I assume you know better than to pillow talk, but even if you do she'll keep your secrets because she knows that one misstep will have the Hagoromo and their bloc down on her head. She'll be loyal, she'll be fun to spend relaxed time with—which I suspect is something you desperately need—and she'll be useful to you."

    It's debatable whether the right skill here is Deceit or Rapport. Nothing Mari is saying is untrue, but it's not entirely true either. She's got an agenda in her words and she's trying to reframe Naruto's perception of reality in ways that are helpful for her and at least somewhat harmful to him because it will cause him to distrust those whom he has previously had no reason to distrust. (Also, there's some negging going on, which is a dick move when attempting to get in a woman's pants but pretty much de rigueur at this level of politics and in defense of your family.) On the other hand, trusting Ami is a fool's choice, so Mari is helping Naruto at the same time. All things considered, I'll go with Deceit.

    Mari, Deceit (mostly): ? + invoke ? + invoke ? + tag ? + ? (dice) = ?
    Naruto, Deceit: ? + invoke ? + ? (dice): ?


    Hazō watched, nervous for Naruto's reaction. Fortunately, the young jinchūriki seemed very much on the back foot and even slightly shaken.

    "Going back to the original point," Mari said after the silence had lingered for a moment. "Hazō was asking what we do now. Hazō, care to expand?"

    "Right. Uh, well...I'm thinking about social and political risks, like—"

    Noburi clutched his chest as though his heart had stopped. "What?! Mari, check his ears! He's been taken over by the lupchanzen!"

    Naruto's off-balance expression vanished and his body tensed as he looked back and forth between Noburi and Hazō.

    Mari bapped Noburi on the arm. "Stop getting your brother in trouble."

    "But Ma," Noburi whined, "it's my turn! Why does he get all the fun of causing massive political disasters for the clan?"

    "Because he's older," Mari said primly. "But if you eat every bite of your vegetables then maybe you'll grow up big and strong and you can cause huge problems too someday."

    "Very funny, you two," Hazō said grumpily. "If we can be serious for a moment, what's our next move?"

    "Depends," Mari said. "What's the goal?"

    "Ultimately? Bring Jiraiya back, preferably before he loses too much of his memory. Then, with his experience at sealing and any knowledge he may have gleaned from the other side, figure out how to rescue everyone else we care about."

    "You know this is insane, right?" Naruto asked.

    Hazō smiled. "Hi, I'm Gōketsu Hazō. It's a pleasure to meet you, Lord Uzumaki. Are you here to help with our latest endeavor?"

    Naruto snorted and then half-strangled as a laugh snuck out and interrupted the snort. "Fine," he said. "I'm not sure I believe this. It's a lot simpler to believe that you found some details in Jiraiya's old journals and you're putting on an elaborate show to try to get on my good side. On the other hand...well, if you're lying then I'm morbidly curious to know how far you're willing to go knowing that once I find out I'm going to bring the wrath of me down on you. If you're telling the truth then of course I want to help. So, what are we doing?"

    "Uh...right," Hazō said, unsure how to take that. "Well, the first thing to emphasize is that I don't know if this was a true vision, and I'm not claiming it was. It's possible that I hallucinated what I hoped to see. I don't remember hearing about the Toad Thrust or the 'Little Miss' nickname, but it's possible that I read it somewhere and have forgotten it. Still, I'm going to proceed as though it were the truth. Which leaves me with lots of questions, like how do we defend against accusations that we're making this up? How do we prevent this falling into the wrong hands or spinning out of control? What aren't we considering? What do we need to do right now? If this is real, it's huge, and we only get one chance not to screw it up. Is there anyone else who needs to know at this moment—maybe Kagome-sensei?"

    "You made a list," Mari accused.

    "Before we even did the ritual," Hazō said. "Now hush and don't distract the menfolk when we're talking about important things."

    Mari's eyebrow went up and her face admitted amusement and promised retribution.

    Naruto grinned. "You guys are nuts, you know that?"

    "Eh," Noburi said. "You get used to it. Anyway, here's my idea: we have a nice evening with no mention of war, Dragons, dead people, or anything else stressful. Tomorrow we take the day off. Hazō, sleep in and don't do Clan-Head things. Spend some time with Akane. Mari...do whatever you do when you want to relax without being simultaneously sexy and terrifying."

    "But Noburi," Mari purred, her face shifting into a cat-with-cream expression, "sexy and terrifying is how I relax. It's being Lady Gōketsu that stresses me out."

    "Uh...right. Anyway, let's take the day off to chew on all this. There's too much going on, we're all stressed to the breaking point. Naruto, you spend the day checking up on us. You're friends with Ino, right? You went to the Academy together."

    "Yeah, why?"

    "She's dating Hazō, so she knows him better than you do. Talk to her about what kind of guy he is, tell her about the ritual and ask her what she thinks." He preemptively waved aside Naruto's objection. "And yes, take the fact that she's dating him into account when considering what she says. After you talk to her...I dunno, take a walk? Spar? Whatever it is you do when you want to let the back of your mind chew something over. If you honestly think we're scamming you, go to the Hokage and tell him that we're scamming you. He'll probably have us executed. If you think we're deluded, send us a message saying so and we'll leave you alone. If you think we're telling the truth to the best of our knowledge, let's meet up again for breakfast the day after tomorrow and figure out how we're going to either pry that O'uzu Island rift open or cut a new one, and how we're going to find Jiraiya after we do."

    He looked around the table at the other three. "That work for everyone?"

    Mari and Hazō waited for Naruto to respond first. After a moment, the blond nodded.

    "Fine," he said. "Sounds like a plan."




    XP AWARD: 1

    Brevity XP: 1

    "GM had fun" XP: 1     Wasn't excited about it at first, but on balance I'm feeling good about a high-stakes convo with Naruto. (No, not 'high-stakes' in the sense of maybe dying, high stakes in the sense of whether or not he's willing to help.)

    Note: The "let's take tomorrow off" thing was to account for the fact that in chapter 516 Hazō took the day off and went on a date with Akane to Tanzaku Gai. Y'all should be voting for what to do the day after that. Chapter 515 (the ritual) was on April 17, chapter 516 (the date) was on April 18, and you should be voting for what to do starting the morning of April 19.

    Vote time! What to do now?

    Voting ends on Wednesday, .
     
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    • Interlude: Minato's Poetry, Part 3
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    • And here, O Reader, be the next part of my commission from @Twinnstars to write the famously bad poetry of Namikaze Minato.


    The Righteous Seventh Chronicle

    Reflect, O Reader
    On the mighty thoughts of yesteryear
    When the Second, brilliant yet mayhap unwise
    Spun forth his image as co-equal its creator to
    And leapt lightly there from here with not space between
    These his marks left upon the world
    Perhaps to good they could turn, left far from war's grasping claw
    Yet naught the world grants as free and fair
    And thus we scheme and ponder, turn and turn again
    On ways to slaughter, these tools to hand, twenty, thirty, lives at once
    No hand so mighty to cry forth "Stop!", yet perhaps degrees by degrees may we cool
    The fevered, wrathful brow of war's sharp glance, turn its gaze widdershins and away.



    The Righteous Eighth Chronicle

    Invert, I wish I could
    The direction of history's mighty flood
    Its hands of blood and war
    The Sage's gift, chakra, turned to slaughter
    Battles fought at every localization and time.



    Cloud Dancing

    I went a'wander, wending wide my steps
    Floating place to place ahead a high cloud's shade
    Always to the sun I shift, but yet that teasing dancer blows close again
    Caressing me, its shadowy cooling fingers all a'taunt
    And yet again I shift, a'grumble and aggrieved
    Seeking always but to have
    Twenty Sagedamned minutes in the sun for a comfy nap
    IS THAT REALLY SO MUCH TO ASK?!?!
     
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    • Chapter 518: The Anatomy of Success
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    • While there was no doubt in anyone's mind that Tsunade was the primary reason for Leaf's leadership in the medical world, few were as aware that the Nara were the second: a traditional master-apprentice system could never have supported the scale of something like Leaf General Hospital, but with the ready availability of affordable medical texts, a trainee could make valuable progress in their discipline without having to constantly tie up experts in instruction time. For this reason, there was nothing strange about seeing Noburi lounging around at home with an intimidating-looking book on plague spirits, or the four kinds of miasma, or the medicinal herbs of the Fire Country and which chakra beasts tended to eat people gathering each one.

    Today's item of Noburi's choice, however, was not a book. It was, at minimum, a tome. Hazō was tempted to even go as far as "grimoire". The humongous black volume, creaking at the seams in defiance of Leaf's best binding techniques (which, according to Kagome-sensei, were cutting-edge and practically art), seemed like it should contain the kind of forbidden lore that would get you executed by Kei just for being in the same building.

    "Enjoying a little leisure reading?" Hazō asked, approaching the dining room table where Noburi had spread his tome, presumably because the desk in his room wouldn't be able to take the weight.

    "Something like that," Noburi said, looking up from an eerie diagram of a man with four arms, four legs, and a singularly fed-up expression. "Dr Yakushi lent me his personal copy of Hyūga Kōzō's Anatomical Manuscript A. They call the guy the second greatest doctor in the world, and you can see why."

    Noburi leafed through the tome to find an example for Hazō, stopping on a magnificently detailed, stomach-churningly grotesque diagram of an eyeball melting over a low heat, its various humours captured in the act of leaking out through the pupil.

    "It's not like we don't get Hyūga medics," Noburi said cheerfully, "and quite a few others are fine with the occasional paid consultation, but Lord Kōzō practically made it his life's work to catalogue the details of the human body in every state of injury and disease. It's really a shame what happened to him."

    "Why?" Hazō asked. "What happened to him?"

    "Apparently, when they raided Orochimaru's compound, they found out where Lord Kōzō had been getting his human bodies in every state of injury and disease. He was the first ever council clan head to be executed."

    "Wait," Hazō said. "They executed a clan head? The Hyūga clan head? You're kidding, right?"

    "That's what Dr Yakushi says," Noburi said. "But I'm pretty sure there are some deep waters there that the likes of you and me will never plumb. Like, it was Lord Kōzō's successor that started the Minami purge, not long after, and you know how the Hokage was weirdly slow to shut the whole thing down given it was practically a mini-clan war. But then again, if you start thinking that he did it to appease the Hyūga after executing their clan head, why did he not only recognise the Minami as a clan but start giving out privacy seals like candy practically the next day?"

    He shrugged. "This is why I leave politics to my humble second-in-command while I focus on the important stuff. Tsunade and the Nara managed to convince the Third not to have all the copies of Anatomical Manuscript A burned, if only barely, and that's good enough for me."

    "Well," Hazō said. "I guess you learn something new every day."

    "You should crack open a book sometime yourself," Noburi said, fondly tapping the weird black blob oozing out from the back of the eyeball. Hazō shuddered.

    "Your humble second-in-command only wishes he had the time," Hazō said. "But forget that. I've had some more thoughts on the thing we were talking about the other day."

    Noburi gave an exaggerated sigh. "I told you, Hazō, those are just old wives' tales. Besides, if you've got multiple shadow clones and you're still disappointing girls that badly, I'm pretty sure your problem isn't your stamina."

    "Very funny," Hazō said. "I was actually talking about your girl problems."

    "I have no idea what you're talking about," Noburi said, raising his voice slightly. "I have no girl problems because I am in a happy and fully satisfying monogamous relationship." He glanced warily through the door into the atrium, then closed it firmly and retreated to his tome. "Seriously, Hazō, do you want to get me killed?"

    "I am unable to answer that question for OPSEC reasons," Hazō said. "But after I thought about your situation for a bit, I remembered something Mari once said back when Jiraiya was alive and I asked her why there was a toy chicken with a pulley in the middle hanging from their bedroom ceiling. She told me, 'Familiarity is the poison that kills relationships'."

    "I did not need to know that."

    "See," Hazō said, "I think you do. Because before I could escape, she grabbed me by the collar and elaborated. And what I got out of that, minus a variety of suggestions that would make Akane's head explode, was that one of the best ways to avoid having to murder your partner for cheating on you is to keep things fresh and exciting, just as if it was still the early days of your relationship. Now, in your case it's more about avoiding being murdered, but it seems like the basic principle should still apply."

    Noburi closed the tome.

    "So are you saying we should copy the early days of our relationship where she was busy being my tour guide to a freaky alien world and humiliatingly overpowered training partner while our diabolical bosses plotted to use us as political tools? Or the days where I was trying to navigate a crazy sealmaster's dream of an emotional minefield while busy fighting with Hyūga for her favour—even now, I can't believe those words are coming out of my mouth—while our diabolical bosses plotted to use us as political tools?"

    "…all right, maybe not the early days of your relationship," Hazō admitted. "But you must have a whole bunch of ideas for what you'd want to do with these hypothetical girls you wish you'd had a chance to date. Why not use them on Yuno?"

    Noburi frowned. "But… we're married. You were there. Isn't this the part where people settle down and start acting like mature adults and talking about redecorating the kitchen and whatever?"

    "I'm pretty sure you'll redecorate our kitchen over Kagome-sensei's dead body," Hazō said. "But it's odd to think of the Noburi I know and may or may not want to get killed bowing to social convention like that. If you want to take Yuno on dates, and give her surprise gifts, and write her terrible love poetry and so on, who's going to stop you? I bet you she'd love for you to simply court her like a single young woman you're in love with, the way nobody ever did."

    "Excuse me," Noburi said peevishly, "my love poetry would be amazing."

    "Oh, really?" Hazō asked. "I just bet you that Isanese love poetry has a 3-17-12-1 pattern, you only rhyme words with two or more vowels, and you have to mention a different kind of fish every third line."

    "…I'll stick with the surprise gifts."

    Hazō gave a sagely nod.

    "I also had another thought, going off the back of my idea about couples' advice."

    "Go on," Noburi said warily.

    "You remember how, after the Great Collapse, we made a point of going around and getting people to share their grief with each other?"

    Noburi nodded.

    "Suppose we got people to do that all the time?"

    "You want people to constantly talk about things that make them miserable?" Noburi asked. "Now, I'm not the world's greatest expert on making people feel better, but that sounds like a fantastic way to send morale through the floor."

    "Nonono," Hazō said. "Suppose we gathered a bunch of wise old people, and others who are good at listening, like bartenders and such, and got them to do it professionally, with salaries and dedicated offices or whatever else they need? That way, the Gōketsu would always have someone who could listen to their problems and give good advice, and by systematising it, you could also get the experts to swap tips and generally raise their skill level. You know the Gōketsu policy is to communicate as much as possible, but there's so much that's hard to talk to family or close friends about."

    Noburi's face, darkened by contemplation of Isanese poetry, lit up like he'd heard Neji tripped and fell in a latrine pit in full view of the Leaf Chūnin Girls.

    "Hazō… that's brilliant. It's an amazing idea. In fact, it's an amazing idea with no obvious ways it can go horribly wrong, which is clear evidence you've been lupchanzed."

    "Fear not, Noburi," Hazō grumbled. "We are only capable of targeting people with brains to consume."

    "Oh, I'm not worried," Noburi said. "If this is what we can expect from a lupchanzed Hazō, then I, for one, welcome our new half-plant, half-animal overlords. Keep him as long as you like.

    "More seriously, this solves a problem Akane and I have been struggling with since forever."

    "What's that?"

    "So you know how the Gōketsu civilian population is seriously top-heavy?" Noburi asked.

    "Right," Hazō said. "Because many of the able-bodied adults moved out again once they had enough money for a place to live that wasn't an improvised shelter outside the safety of the village walls, while old people who had nowhere to go generally stuck around."

    "And the thing with old civilians is…" Noburi began. "OK, do you know Hariko, the old woman with the mindmelting yellow lingerie on her laundry lines?"

    "Is that who that stuff belongs to?" Hazō asked. "I half-wondered if it was Mari showing off to the civilians."

    "I've had to sit through Hariko's life story at least three times now during my rounds," Noburi said, "and it made me think about a bunch of stuff I hadn't considered before, so I've decided I'm going to share the pain.

    "See, Hariko grew up as a subsistence farmer in one of those no-name villages up north. One year, there was a chakra bloatworm infestation that took out one of the fields right before harvest-time, and the tax collector was in a bad mood when he was passing through, and in the end, they didn't have enough left for everyone to last the winter. So there Hariko's family was, slowly starving to death, and then one morning, Hariko woke up and her elderly mother was gone. Just like that, nothing but a series of footprints through the snow into the chakra-beast-filled forest. Because apparently, that's what you do in a farming village when times are tough and you're just an extra mouth to feed. You go into the forest, and your family isn't forced to make choices they'll have to live with forever in order to make sure as many people as possible make it through the winter.

    "As it happens, Hariko got lucky not long after that. A clanless ninja passing through decided to take her back to Leaf as his mistress. Not that she had a choice or anything, but on the other hand, living in Leaf, and under a ninja's protection at that, is a better fate than most peasants in the world can hope for.

    "Buuut… leap forward a couple of years and the natural order of everything sucking reasserts itself. The ninja dies on a mission, and his family obviously aren't going to let a filthy civilian keep the home, so there she is, out on the street with no money and no marketable skills, and nothing going for her except the gorgeous body that got her into this mess in the first place. Still, Hariko is a survivor who has Seen Some Shit just by virtue of being a peasant girl, so she works with what she's got, and eventually manages to make ends meet by working as a seamstress at a yakuza joint.

    "Leap way forward, to last year. Hariko's getting fewer clients as she gets older, and her health is shaky by now, so she's preparing to retire. Then one fine night while she's at work…"

    Noburi plunged his hand down, as if throwing something away.

    "…our best buddies from Hidden Rock drop her house into the Abyss, or whatever they have here instead of the Abyss, with all her savings still in it because she's a country bumpkin who never got her head around the idea of banks. You know what happens after that—it's the Gōketsu to the rescue, and suddenly instead of starving to death in the gutter, she gets a roof over her head and three meals a day and none of it makes any sense but she's not going to question the miracle in case it goes away. Happy ending, right?"

    "Isn't it?"

    "Here's the thing," Noburi said. "Out in the villages, if you can't work, then you're just a useless extra mouth to feed. And Hariko's living here now, but she's still got no marketable skills, and also her hands are starting to grow numb, so that cuts off most of her remaining options. The way she sees it, she's a parasite. Then bam! Suddenly, the magical young Lord Gōketsu, who saved her life without asking anything in return, is deep in debt for reasons that she doesn't get, but obviously weren't his fault because he's a saint. And Hariko's still a useless extra mouth to feed. And then she remembers what her mother had the guts to do for the sake of her family…"

    Hazō winced. "But she's still around, right?"

    Noburi nodded. "She is, sure. Our civilians do look out for each other. But, knowing everything I've just told you, think about what it'd mean for old civilians to have a job that only they can do, without needing new skills that they might feel it's too late to pick up.

    "All right," he said. "I'm excited enough about this that I reckon I'll go get the ball rolling. I'm sure Lord Kōzō will forgive me. See you later, Lupchazō!"

    "Wait!" Hazō called out as Noburi headed out the door. "Before you go, I had a medicine question for you. Also, don't call me that in case Kagome-sensei gets the wrong idea."

    "Spoilsport," Noburi muttered. "So what's the question?"

    "When is a dying person beyond saving? Say their heart's stopped. Can you still resuscitate them?"

    "Depends," Noburi said. "To dumb it down by a few kilometres for a layman, you die when your soul leaves the body, and the most common reason the soul leaves the body is when it's damaged so the soul doesn't recognise it as a human body anymore. A human body, as far as the soul is concerned, has a beating heart. If your heart stops, the soul doesn't belong there anymore, so it starts to leave. If you're really quick, maybe you can get the heart to start again before it does, and then the soul will figure it's in a human body again and decide to stick around. Otherwise, it's going to go follow the cycle of reincarnation, where eventually it gets drawn to a different type of body based on how it's been shaped by its experiences—but that's eschatology and not really my problem as a medic.

    "So there's no 'point where a dying person is beyond saving'. The soul leaves when it leaves, and maybe that's instant, and maybe it'll be a couple of minutes. It depends on the soul, and the type of death, and what you can do about it and how fast. Why, who are you trying to kill for good? If it's Orochimaru, then I reckon you need to back up and figure out if he has a soul to begin with, because the evidence ain't promising."

    "Actually," Hazō said, "it's the other way round. I have ideas for seals to suspend people near death, in case we can't save them now but maybe we can save them later."

    Noburi frowned. "I don't know if a seal's going to be able to stop the soul from leaving the body. That sounds like, I dunno, a step beyond biosealing and into levels of weirdness even Orochimaru isn't into. On the other hand, I'm not a sealmaster. The stuff you guys do makes no sense to me anyway."

    "I'm not sure it makes sense to me either," Hazō confessed after a second. "I tell the fundamental laws underpinning the universe what to do, and they just go, 'Yeah, sure, you got it, boss'. That's more than I get out of my actual subordinates."

    "Hey," Noburi said, "maybe if you did a lucky dance of my choice every time you asked me to do something, I'd be an ideal subordinate too. Why not give it a try for a few months, see how it goes?"

    Hazō rolled his eyes. "Get out of here, Noburi."

    "Yeah, sure, you got it, boss."

    -o-​

    The rest of the plan is left in @eaglejarl's wicked talons.
     
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    • Chapter 519: Gōketsu Plans and Loyalties
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    • "Have a seat," Hazō said, waving towards the visitor's chair even as he let himself sag into his own with a long groan.

    "You are too young to have up and down noises," Mari said, laughing.

    "Up and down noises?"

    Her face and posture shifted, becoming those of a much older woman. She dropped into the chair with a sigh. She let herself settle back for a moment, then leaned forward, hands on her thighs, and levered herself to her feet with a grunt. She smiled and shifted again, becoming once more the young and vital woman who had charmed her way into a position of influence throughout the most important city in the world.

    "Up and down noises," she said, sitting down silently and fluidly.

    Hazō chuckled. "What's the line? It's not the years, it's the mileage?"

    "You might be light on years, but you're a little light on mileage too," she shot back.

    "I'm really not," he said, jagged lines of miles and misery carving themselves across his face for just a moment. They vanished as quickly as they had come, replaced with a casual smile. "Anyway, this meeting's not about that. I wanted to thank you for your help at the ritual."

    "You're thanking me for burning your brain to ash?"

    "Hey, it was only a little bit of ash!"

    Sea-green eyes rolled like marbles. "You're welcome. What's next? Should I set you on fire?"

    Hazō pretended to consider it for a moment, then shook his head with a somber look. "No, on balance I think that would be counterproductive."

    "Well, that's a relief."

    "Heh. Yeah, I suppose. Anyway, I wanted to talk with the best political expert in Leaf about what our next moves should be. Specifically, I wrote up a report for Asuma and I want to know if and when I should turn it in." He scooped a sheaf of pages off the top of the rightmost pile on his desk and passed it over.

    She flicked through it, spy's eyes recording the information quickly, and then shuffled back to the second page to check something. Finally, she looked up.

    "You're going to tell him that your plan is to pry open a scar in space and time, break into the Naraka Path, scout around until you find our people, and pull Jiraiya and Hiruzen back to the living world."

    He shrugged. "I mean...yes? That's the plan. We've had trouble in the past caused by keeping secrets from Asuma." He paused. "And Cannai. And—"

    "Yeah, yeah, lesson learned, good job," she said, waving him to silence. She thought for a moment. "Hazō, have you ever heard the parable of the cat?"

    "Tell me."

    "Cat sits on a hot griddle, gets its butt scorched and runs for the hills."

    "And it never sits on the griddle again. Sure."

    "Right. But it also never sits on a cold griddle."

    "You're saying this is a cold griddle?"

    "I'm saying there's nothing in this document that Asuma needs to know. You made the strange decision to have yourself psychically attacked. You then had a hallucination about a man you respect, who you wish was doing your job so that you can do the fun things that you aren't currently getting to do."

    "I saw that whole Toad Thrust thing. That's new information that Naruto confirmed is real."

    "Which, if shown to Asuma, will make him go to Naruto and say 'hey, is this real?' to which Naruto will reply 'maybe, or maybe they are lying' to which Asuma will say 'hm, good point' and start thinking bad things that we don't want him thinking. So, yes. You had a hallucination that we can't prove was real."

    "But we know the afterlife is real. I pulled Daizen—"

    "Off a beach. Which could have been on the Seventh Path, or even on some other part of the Human Path."

    "Lots of seas of acid on the Human Path, are there?"

    "We've seen grass that drinks blood, ants made out of acid—"

    "They weren't made of acid, they just excreted it."

    "And somehow did not damage themselves but were able to melt holes in metal."

    "It wasn't the Human Path!" he said, throwing his hands in the air. "It drained chakra out of my seals!"

    "Or your seals were improperly made."

    Hazō eyes narrowed.

    "Okay, okay," she said, raising her hands. "Your seals are never improperly made."

    "No seals are ever improperly made," Hazō said. "You either have a failure when they're created or they work reliably." He hesitated. "Well, occasionally if a seal gets destroyed in a weird way you get a failure, but that's not down to the seal being invalid. What they don't do is simply stop working because there's no chakra left in them. Not here, not on the Seventh Path. Only in that place on the other side of the portal. The afterlife."

    "You don't know that," she said, stubbornly demanding he face reality. "All you know is that it happened, you have no idea why. Maybe that place was the afterlife, but what does that have to do with no chakra? Or maybe it was one of the other Paths. There's essentially nothing known about them, so why shouldn't they drain chakra?"

    "Hang on, how do you know there's nothing known about them?"

    She tipped her head in that archly superior way that (presumably) every parent trains a big sister to do the moment their little brother is born. "Because I've asked? Duh? You've been going on about exploring the Naraka Path for months. Obviously I'm going to try to find out whatever I can that will help you." A cloud of frustration tripped momentarily across her face. "Not that I've been able to find a damn thing that's stronger than spit. Even the bedtime stories are inconsistent."

    "Thank you, Mari," Hazō said, his smile soft and real. "I didn't know you were doing that."

    She mimed a curtsy without moving from her chair. "I'm your spymistress. It's my job to support you on the things you care about, O Mighty Clan Lord."

    "Yeeeaaaah...right. Going back to the earlier subject: you said I shouldn't turn this report in to Asuma yet?"

    She shook her head. "There's nothing here that's actionable for him and nothing that relates to politics, domestic or international. The absolute best that would result from him seeing this is that he laughs and thinks you're a bit barmy. More likely, if you say that you want to resurrect the Third it's simply going to remind him of his loss and cause him pain. Hold onto it until there's something solid. If you get the rift open, we report that but we leave out words like 'afterlife' and 'resurrection'. We simply say so far as we can tell it's virgin territory that Leaf might be able to extract resources from and that we're informing him as a courtesy since, as the Gōketsu did all the work, we are laying claim to the portal and the territory beyond it."

    She shifted in her chair, gazing up at the endless vista of intuition that concealed itself on the ceiling. "He'll respond that that's wonderful, but the possibility that the portal opens to somewhere else in the Elemental Nations means that the Tower needs to be involved in order to prevent geopolitical issues resulting from hostile first contact with ninja from another nation. We'll counter by saying that the chakra-draining effect makes it clear that this is nowhere on the Human Path and therefore there are no geopolitical implications, so us developing it is no different than if the Hyūga dug a new gold mine or the Aburame developed a new breed of insect that produces huge amounts of honey.

    "He'll come back by saying that the Tower needs to have people involved in the exploration for purposes of tax assessment." She frowned. "That one will be harder to deal with, but we can get some traction from the idea that the Tower doesn't send tax assessors on mineral exploration teams. They send them in after the clan in question registers the claim, and therefore the same should happen here."

    "Hm." She cocked her head, thinking. "We should lay some groundwork, get some laws preemptively passed. We can disguise it as sparring with the Hagoromo...we'll find some new product or market that they're looking to expand into and we'll put forth a proposal that, in order to ensure taxation is fairly distributed, the Tower should have tax assessors deployed along with all economic development teams, with appropriate ninja bodyguards to ensure their safety. The clans will hate the idea of having bureaucrats peering over their shoulder, the Hokage will hate the idea of tying up our limited ninja manpower on babysitting missions, and the idea will get knocked down so hard it will leave a crater. Of cou—"

    "We don't want to look like we're stirring things up with the Hagoromo," Hazō interrupted. "Thin ice there, and lots of potential blowback."

    She narrowed her eyes at him. "As I was saying, of course we don't want to be the ones floating the idea ourselves, because it could look like we're stirring things up with the Hagoromo. No, we'll launder it through the Uchiha. It's to their advantage for such a law to pass, since it would mean every exploratory mission they send out would get a ninja escort attached without them having to pay for a C-rank mission. Given that their Clan Head is also their only functional ninja and their finances are still not what they were before the Massacre, that's obviously something that they would want." She thought for a moment. "Give me Gaku for a week or two? We can work out a proposed legislation and propose it to the Uchiha as though we were building a coalition. The tax assessors will be a sacrificial line item but we'll get something real in there for them that will pass in exchange for killing the tax assessors clause."

    Hazō laughed. "Your brain is a twirly whirly place, isn't it?"

    "Bucket o' snakes, refreshed daily," she agreed with a smile.

    "In that case," Hazō said, "put some of those twirly whirls to work on my next thing: I want access to the Nagi Island seal and the weird metal array that went with it. No idea what it did, but studying it would be interesting and it's the only example I have of a sealing array of that size that was created by modern humans. It might give me some ideas for fixing the Great Seal, or at least coming up with a better patch."

    "Hm." She frowned. "I'll try, but I'd be very surprised if the thing is even still there."

    "Why n...oh." Hazō sighed and slumped back in his chair. "Because every Kage would have wanted their people to study it and every Kage would have wanted everyone else's people to not study it." He grimaced. "And this is why we can't have nice things."

    "In fairness," Mari said, shrugging, "it does seem like the thing was going to destroy the world as we know it. Rewrite people's brains or get rid of chakra or blow up anyone who raised a hand against another person, or...who knows? Those guys were nuts."

    "I suppose."

    "Look, I'll approach Asuma on your behalf," she said. "I just want you to brace yourself for a no."

    "Yeah, yeah. Well, do your best. And, as long as you're talking to Asuma, here's another thing on your docket: I want him to authorize Shadow Clone for Kagome-sensei and Noburi. Tell him that Kagome-sensei needs it for safety during our investigation of the Great Seal and Noburi needs it in order to improve his ability to serve as a medic-nin trainee. He can be in multiple places that way."

    "I'll try," she said, after thinking a bit, "but I don't see it happening. Shadow Clone is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, secrets of Leaf. As far as I know, the memory-sharing aspect of it isn't widely known, but the fact that the clones are intelligent and as skilled as their user makes it something that every village in the world wants. Kagome is a walking information leak and it's already well established that medics aren't considered to be inside the compartment or else every doctor would already have it." She shrugged. "I haven't spent that much time at the hospital, but I don't remember ever seeing two Tsunades running around and you told us that she has it. If she's not using it to work on multiple patients at the same time then she agrees with it staying that tightly compartmentalized and she's not going to go to bat for Noburi to have it. She might even oppose it, since him getting it when no other medics have sounds a lot like nepotism."

    Hazō rubbed his jaw in thought. "Do you think we could buy it?"

    "Say what now?"

    "You already made the point that when we pry that rift to the afterlife open, the Gōketsu are going to be the sole owners of an absolutely enormous amount of resources. Suppose we told the Tower that we would sell them...I dunno, as much land as there is in Fire along with all the mineral rights and help developing it, in exchange for all senior Gōketsu ninja being granted Shadow Clone."

    Mari leaned back in her chair, stunned. She said nothing for several long seconds. "I think..." she said at last, before trailing off. "I think that would need to be a very careful negotiation. There are so many ways it could go wrong—it could look like we were trying to bribe the Hokage, or like we were more concerned about the Gōketsu's power than the security of one of Leaf's greatest secrets, or like we had this vast territory that we could simply disappear to if we weren't given enough lollipops and brightly-colored ribbons. One wrong word could absolutely destroy every scrap of goodwill we have with the Tower. Plus, the other clans would learn about the deal soon enough and they would go ballistic at the idea that Leaf's security compartments are open to anyone with deep enough pockets."

    Hazō very carefully did not say 'Shadow Clone training is increasing our rate of growth so much that in a few years you, Akane, Kei, and I will all be S-rank badasses who can tell the clans to go eat dirt if they look at us funny.' Not only was it the sort of thing that would be disastrous if word got out that he had even thought it, but it wasn't that simple.

    Everyone who had access to Shadow Clone from the time of Tobirama to the current day knew that it could speed up training of certain things. Make a Shadow Clone and have it practice throwing kunai alongside you for an hour. When the clone popped and its memories reunited with your own, you would have the experience of practicing for two hours. The Shadow Clone technique, as Jiraiya had once confirmed to Team Uplift, was the reason that Leaf's jōnin tended to be moderately more powerful than their peers from other villages.

    Moderately more. Not infinitely more, not even exponentially more.

    There were two limits on Shadow Clone training, the first being the immense chakra cost. Not only did it require a large amount of chakra to create even a single clone, but whenever a clone appeared or disappeared, chakra rebalanced itself between the caster and every Shadow Clone they currently had, thereby cutting their reserves in half after taking a huge bite out of them to start. It meant that even with jōnin-level chakra reserves, creating a single clone left you too low on chakra to practice jutsu or even chakra-boosted combat. It was really only good for training physical combat skills, stealth, and similar things. Not the jutsu and chakra-integrated taijutsu that most ninja depended on for combat. Well, it was good for that and for doing paperwork and other Clan Head duties, but it was likely that the only Clan Heads in Leaf with access to Shadow Clone were Sarutobi Asuma (the Hokage), Senju Tsunade (grandniece of the technique's inventor), and Gōketsu Hazō (brilliant weapons designer at a time when the scent of war had been on the wind).

    The chakra limitation went away the moment that Noburi became a Leaf ninja. His ability to transfer chakra from random non-busy ninja into his family meant that Akane, Kei, Mari, and Hazō were able to have as many clones training each day as they desired.

    The other limitation of the Shadow Clone was more insidious: clone sickness. Human brains were not designed to handle experiencing multiple simultaneous worldlines. When a clone popped, its experiences hit like a brick. The pain grew based on how many clones one had out and how long they had existed. It was quite possible to damage yourself via clone sickness—indeed, it had happened. Senju Chikashi, one of the first ninja to learn the technique after its creation, had overdone it and suffered seizures and temporary paralysis that took months to heal. Refusing to learn the lesson, he later killed himself through overtraining with Shadow Clones.

    That limitation was rapidly being disproven by one Gōketsu Hazō. It was possible to train yourself to handle clone sickness better—all you needed to do was learn to keep your focus on who you were and which of your worldlines belonged to your original self. The problem was that training the necessary focus involved creating lots of clones and having them sit around meditating or doing painful and exhausting exercises while staying concentrated on a single idea. While they were metaphorically navel-gazing they were not working on combat skills, or paperwork, or anything else useful. It made the entire effort somewhat pointless; why should you suffer pain and boredom and be constantly low on chakra if there was no extra skill gain from it?

    Hazō's realization was that if one could have dozens of clones practicing all day then one's skill growth would be astronomical. So astronomical, in fact, that it was worth investing a few years of practicing nothing but resisting clone sickness. The time would pay itself back in spades once he and his clan mates could actually handle having dozens of Shadow Clones training all day without the caster's brains exploding out their ears when the clones popped.

    To him it seemed so obvious that he couldn't understand why it wasn't standard for every trusted Leaf ninja to train this way.

    ​
    "Because, Hazō," Kei had said all those months ago, "no one except a god or perhaps a jinchūriki has the chakra to power such a training regimen."​
    ​
    "Sure," Hazō said. "But now that Noburi is here"—he nodded respectfully to his brother—"everyone is going to see that this is possible and be knocking on our door. If we handle it right this will be the single biggest asset our clan has. Noburi, absent a direct order from the Hokage, I'm never going to order you to supply chakra to anyone outside the clan. That means you'll be the gateway to massive power. Everyone in the village will need to keep your goodwill or you don't supply them." He hesitated and looked to Kei. "Unless...can the Hokage simply order him to do it?"​
    ​
    Kei hesitated. "I am uncertain," she said at last. "It would depend on some very specific interpretations of law. On the one hand, the Hokage has the power to order any Leaf ninja to engage in any mission. In theory, he could class recharging other Leaf ninja as a C-rank mission and assign such missions to Noburi. On the other hand, 'mission' typically implies something that happens outside the walls of Leaf. Well, aside from the D-rank missions that are essentially chores inside the village and are used as teambuilding exercises for new genin and punishment assignments for more senior ninja. Noburi is a bloodline holder and a member of a voting clan. The other clans might not be comfortable with the precedent—no Hyūga would wish to be involuntarily assigned to police patrol inside the village, no Aburame would wish to be assigned to ridding another clan's housing of insect infestations, and so on. There is also the question of specificity. To the greatest extent possible, the law and Tower policy are supposed to treat all ninja equally. Noburi is the only Leaf ninja with his bloodline and therefore any law or policy related to forcing him to use it would be specific to him. It would set the precedent that the Tower can set rules for individual ninja that are different from the general body of ninja."​
    ​
    "Yeah," Noburi said, "but it's not like anyone could stop him, right? He's the Hokage. He can do what he likes. The Clan Council is just an advisory body."​
    ​
    "Yes and no," Mari said. "Yes, in theory the Hokage is an autocrat. No one can countermand his orders and he is not answerable to any legal proceeding. On the other hand, societies only work with the consent of the governed. Become too awful and the number of missing-nin starts to increase. People don't tell you bad news, so you end up with a distorted view of what's happening. The clans work against you in subtle ways—dragging their feet, or simply not volunteering. Yagura was willing to accept those costs but the Hokage have historically been different. I don't think any of them would have been willing to engender that level of opposition."​
    ​
    "There is a more straightforward reason that others are unlikely to think of this," Kei said. "They are not us. The Gōketsu are new to Leaf and we have little to no actual loyalty to it. We are here because our interests align; should our interests diverge far enough, it is entirely plausible that we would depart again. We lack the generational investment in Leaf's success that the other clans have. Part of that investment is a sense of patriotism and duty. Most of the other clans could easily sustain themselves on their various income streams—land ownership and the taxes that result from it, merchant caravans, and so on. There is no need for any Aburame ninja to ever take the field, nor any Hyūga, nor Hagoromo, and so on. And yet, they do. Every ninja in Leaf goes on missions as often as they are physically capable of so doing. They see it as an honor to risk their lives, even knowing that they will almost certainly die young. As a result, they are not going to spend a moment thinking about any training regimen that involves investing years in skills that do not aid their field performance.​
    ​
    "We, on the other hand, lack that sense of obligation. If we are frank, Team Uplift would undoubtedly be fine to sit around and do nothing while other ninja take care of defending the city and preserving the sanctity of Fire's borders."​
    ​
    "That's a little unfair," Hazō said, shifting uncomfortably. "I'm great with the idea of defending the city and the borders and all that. I simply want to do it efficiently. If we can turn our entire clan into a bunch of S-rank ninja, that's going to contribute a lot more to Leaf's safety than a handful of chūnin and one or two jōnin would."​
    ​
    Mari nodded. "Sure. But Kei makes a good point. I doubt that any other clan, not even the Nara, is going to see it that way. If taking missions is a badge of honor then cowering at home is shameful, even if one pinky-promises with syrup on top that you're only doing it to get stronger so you can be more effective later, no really we swear!"​
    ​
    Hazō's lips compressed in frustration. "Fine. Whatever. I don't care about their idiotic nationalism. I don't want you guys dying, so we're going to train efficiently. That means everyone is working on managing clone sickness until I say otherwise. Three or four or five years from now, when we can all go toe-to-toe with Orochimaru and Tsunade, we'll take all comers regarding whether or not the Gōketsu are an honorable clan. Until then, fuck 'em."​
    ​
    ​

    Hazō shook his head to bring himself back from the fond memory of days when the team was united and comparatively drama-free. He took a moment to reorient.

    "Okay," he said. "It's a fraught conversation, fine. On which subject, how is your own training going?"

    "It's going fine," she said, frowning in puzzlement.

    "No no. Your training. You know...WHOOSH!" He made a gesture like a bird taking off: linear movement, then curving up into the air.

    "Oh, right. Yeah, that's going fine too."

    He waited a beat to see if she would expand on that; she'd always been very cagey about what she was training and how. When she simply smiled innocently back at him he gave it up. "Fine. Back to Kagome-sensei and Noburi. Buying Shadow Clone for them might perhaps be feasible given giant piles of money, but that's a ways out and very risky. Is there another way to get it for them?"

    Mari grimaced. "Honestly, not that I can think of. Nothing that doesn't come with catastrophic risks, anyway—for example, you could teach it to them without Tower approval and hope that they can keep it secret. I recommend against that in the strongest terms. If you want to do that, better if we all go missing again right now."

    "Wouldn't work," Hazō said. "Us going missing would draw an absolutely cataclysmic response. Not only do we have Shadow Clone but I've got a head full of highest-security strategic information and intelligence details. Plus, Noburi is a lynchpin of Leaf's new tactical doctrine. We'd barely clear the gates before there would be a dozen teams of hunters after us, each of them with Hyūga, Aburame, and Inuzuka trackers."

    "I'm not sure if I'm more alarmed that you've clearly thought about this or relieved that you've realized it's impractical," Mari said with a smile.

    Hazō didn't return the smile. "I'm the Clan Head, Mari. It's literally my job to think about worst-case scenarios and how I can keep you all safe if things go absolutely to crap."

    "Uh, right. Okay, well...I don't currently see any good way to get Shadow Clone for Noburi or Kagome. I'll try to come up with something, but I wouldn't hold your breath." She paused. "If you do in fact get that portal open and there's huge and exploitable resources behind it then we can revisit the idea of buying it for them. Until then, keep that idea completely under wraps, okay?"

    Hazō nodded, the smile slipping out again. "Believe it or not, I can learn from past mistakes."

    She dragged her hand dramatically across her brow as though wiping away sweat. "Phew! What a relief!"

    He flicked a blob of sealing wax at her head and blew her a raspberry. She swatted the wax aside and danced out of the room, laughing.




    Other segments of the plan happened offscreen, specifically:
    • Ami style training: use max strength Banshee Slayers for a day. Communicate with gestures, facial expressions, and body language.
    • 4x SC read Sealing notes for 7 days.
    • Level Sealing to 29. Day 8, attempt MARS. (Multiple Activation Relay Seal, a seal that can be paired with 0-2 seals and, when MARS is activated, will cause its paired seals to activate.)
      • Request Kagome's assistance.
      • Invoke "Kagome Certified Research Facility", "Promising Sealing Student".
      • Mild Burnout okay.
    • Author's Note: After leveling Hazō's sealing to 29 his Summoning Scroll Acolyte stunt (SSA) gives him an effecting Sealing skill of 51, meaning a +6 Aspect Bonus (AB). You can gain benefit from at most AB days of prep, each of which gives you +2 to your Calligraphy and Sealing rolls. In other words, you don't benefit from the 7th day of prep. On the other hand, SSA inflicts a Mild Consequence on Hazō after he makes a research roll and that Consequence takes 2 days to clear. The plan calls for the update to be 8 days long, so that's what I'll do. You did 6 days of prep, made the roll on the 7th day, and you will be halfway through your recovery period instead of right at the beginning of it.


    XP AWARD: 30

    Brevity XP: 8

    Ami-style training: 1

    "GM had fun" XP: 0     No strong feelings about this plan.

    Rolls for the MARS seal:
    • Hazō, Calligraphy (29) + 12 (prep) -3 (dice): 38. Safe!
    • Hazō, Sealing (51) + 12 (prep) + 6 (invoke "Promising Sealing Student" personal Aspect) + 6 (invoke "Kagome-Certified Sealing Lab") + ? (Kagome-sensei's Sealing AB from his assistance) + 6 (dice): 81 + ? Safe!


    Hazō and Kagome had an excellent time working together and made incredible progress. They feel like they're close; with a little luck, another session like that could finish the seal.

    It is now about 7am on April 27.

    Vote time! What to do now?

    Voting ends on Wednesday, .
     
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    • Interlude: Minato's Poetry, Part 4
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    • The fourth part of my commission for @Twinnstars, in which I write the famously bad poetry of the Fourth Hokage.


    Translator's Note: Due to the limitations of the publishing medium, marginalia have been inserted inline. In some cases this may suggest that they were written while the poem was only partially complete, but the original text neither confirms nor disconfirms this idea.


    The Righteous Third Chronicle

    Cut from mighty cloth
    Thoughts out our heads do fly
    our thoughts are cut from cloth?
    STAY OUT OF MY DRAFTS!
    then don't leave them lying around!
    THEY WERE LOCKED IN MY DESK!!!!
    pfft. Call that a lock?
    Yes, these the swirling wisdom
    Of right- and leftmost, front- and backmost
    are you feeling okay, honey? you're sounding weird. do you have a fever? or maybe brain damage?
    Argh! Why do you taunt me so, you foul woman?!
    I can't help it. you're so much fun to tease. :p
    Leaders, followers, both and two
    Be it now the pen's strokes or the hand's strokes
    you know, if you would put all this 'poetry' aside and come to bed some night, we could talk about that hands' strokes thing... *eyebrow waggle*
    okay, seriously, I locked this in a safe that I put in a storage seal that I folded up and slipped between the floorboards. by the name of the Sage, how did you find it?!
    come to bed and I'll tell you
    ...okay
    By which was history's draining, moment and moment and moment, ever secured
    Now the gift of modernity: we may invert these grinding, glaring pains of yesteryear
    And in inversion change them, death to life the pattern new
    An age of darkness first and war beyond, now third the age of reason brung
    Our hope so simple is: let not our fleeting minds blank be found.


    The Joys of Jutsu

    Chakra, lightly sing and sprightly prancey
    Betwixt my mind and fancy
    it's spelled 'prancy'
    *sigh* what have I said about my drafts?
    that I'm very clever for always finding them?
    yes, except I believe I actually spelled it 'stay out!!!!!'
    Twist and twirl, a lovely girl
    A spring morn and twisty tale
    Of heroes brave and villains pale
    the internal rhyme thing is a nice bit but if you're going to do it then you should do it consistently
    by the Sage's name, IT'S A DRAFT!
    My thoughts made manifest
    More joy than wifely love and then a good night's rest
    rowr! also, more joy? I'm not sure if I'm more motivated or angry
    you're cute when you're angry, so I see this as a win either way. Also, this is what you get for going into my drafts. :p
    Your flowing curves preferred to her tangled hair
    Her morning breath, like unto a dead raccoon
    okay, now you're just being mean
    nyah!
    Her bazillion bottles, pots, and creams
    Vanity's tools, spread atop our washing basin
    I wonder, does she simply stick her entire face in?
    *glare*
    hehehehe
    Her cleansing of the toe cheese
    Always makes me freeze
    Abject horror on my face
    I feel the need to flee this

    [Translator's note: There is a large ink blot here, stretching down to where the rest of the page is torn away]
     
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