"When you create another seal you have to add it to the master seal. Plus you'd have to write down everyone and everything that you didn't want your seal to go off around. True it could be considered efficient as a concept, but I would make it like this."
...
Orochimaru finishes the trigger and slides it over to me.
"That could work." I eagerly pick up the seal and twist it this way and that way to fully understand it. "What you're doing is instead of having the seal report to a specific master seal it's just looking for another instance of itself."
"Yes. This removes the need for the master seal array entirely." Orochimaru eagerly explains to me. "Instead of checking a ridiculously long list of conditions all it has to do is look to see if there's another like it within range. This version is much easier to apply, and with a lot of practice you could apply it during combat. This also removes the need for unnecessary upkeep to your master seal array, you can just give seals to whoever needs them at the time."
"Okay, I see your idea there. There's a problem with it though, I'd be handing out seals that swallow everything indiscriminately. Pretty sure not everyone is going to let me draw on their chests, especially the kunoichi. I really don't want to piss them off and casually asking 'hey let me get you topless so I can draw this on you real quick' would do that. Sure I can take a beating but that doesn't mean I enjoy it."
"I believe a specific Kusa kunoichi would say otherwise." Orochimaru playfully teases me.
"I'm not going to dignify that with a response." I evenly say. "So, how do you expect me to work around that?"
"What are we working on? What type of seal?" Orochimaru asks me some leading questions. He wants me to figure this part out myself.
"Another defense for my hearts, a crude and basic time-space seal that swallows everything around it that is activated by an advanced trigger."
"Wrong." Orochimaru's eyes dance in enjoyment. He's loving every moment of our brainstorming session. "That's the entire array, what we're working on is..."
"The trigger." It clicks. I get what he's hinting at, it's literally in front of my face. He's already shown me a solution before I even asked my question. "Just the trigger. The trigger doesn't care what seal it activates, that seal can be anything from my heart seal to your harmless explosive tag. And since the trigger is only looking for another trigger it can be used on any type of seal and still work as a beacon to make another trigger not activate."
"Exactly." Orochimaru mirrors my enthusiasm. "All you'll have to do is give someone a copy of the trigger then they're protected. That's much easier and the seal itself is much quicker to make and less complicated. There is no need to make some long and convoluted list of things that you don't want blown up."
"Brilliant!" I beam up at the Snake Sannin. "How did you come up with that?"
"I stole the premise from the Hiraishin, each marker acts like a beacon to the user. In this case the scale is much smaller and is for seals alone instead of the user, it's completely autonomous once you place a seal. That alone makes this much easier to create, I simply have no idea how the Hiraishin works other than some far-fetched theories."
"This is great! I've been trying to make this for almost a week now and that was as far as I got. Though I am kinda miffed that you just waltzed in here and had a solution ready within minutes."
"There's no need to feel dejected." Orochimaru attempts to comfort me. "I've been working with seals for decades, you don't even have six months of experience. It's miraculous how far you've come in that time. I've seen highly capable seal users that couldn't begin to even think of your solution, let alone craft it!"
"You sure you don't want to help me with the Sword of Totsuka? That would make things go a lot quicker." I plaster a shit eating smile on my face. "Please?"
"No. That is your project." Orochimaru doesn't cave.
"Fine, fine. So did you need something? We got distracted." Totally okay with that though. He solved one of my problems.
"Oh so we did! This is why we shouldn't share laboratories, we'd constantly be distracted." He's got a point there, once we started to talk seals we disregarded everything else. "I've heard some very interesting rumors about you."
"Already?" I tap my chin with a finger and look off into the distance as if I'm deep in thought. "I don't remember doing anything noteworthy yet."
"I was told that you ransacked one of the kitchens and made off with various ingredients, ranging from distilled water to cooking oil, to vodka. Care to explain that? Especially the last one."
"Oh they're over there." I haphazardly gesture to the other side of my large lab. Numerous beakers are all filled to the exact same amounts of various liquids. There's two rows of ten sitting on the table.
"So they are." Orochimaru strolls over to them and reads all of the labels. "But why are they here?"
I shrug as I fiddle with my own version of Orochimaru's trigger. "I'm attempting to make the Sword of Totsuka."
"And?" Orochimaru prods me to continue.
"It's a chakra blade made of liquid. I'm going to test how well each of those liquids holds chakra, hence the labels and the precise amount of each. I don't want skewed data because I used twice as much water as I did vodka. I've already channeled more chakra than most chunin have at their disposal into each one. Next is to see which one holds the chakra the longest."
"Understandable. What was the point of using so much chakra though? I get that you of all people don't need to be stingy with it, but isn't more than a chunin has a bit much?"
"The time frame was too small. Just adding in enough chakra to power an E-ranked jutsu and each liquid only held that chakra for less than a second. Even adding enough for a C-ranked jutsu didn't provide me with enough of a time difference to truly get accurate data, so I said fuck it and dumped in a shit ton."
"But why vodka?"
"The swords traps people in a drunken genjutsu. Why not vodka? There's also rum, gin, tequila, whiskey, brandy, and a few beers too. There's more variants of alcohol there than anything else."
"Where did you find all of that? How did you even get it all? You're thirteen!"
"I'm a shinobi?" I quizzically look at Orochimaru.
"Oh. Yes. Funny how you forget the little things. I'll be going now, it's obvious that you're preoccupied. Plus the longer I stay here the more I feel myself wanting to join you and I've already stayed far past what I intended. Unfortunately there are things that require my attention."
"Yeah and I'm going to go write on my hearts. That is a weird concept." I stand up and shrug off the lab coat then remove the rest of my layers until my torso is bare.
"Until next time, my child." Orochimaru tenderly says as he prepares to leave.
"See ya. We should have a powwow like this again sometime, it was nice to work with someone competent."
"Oh believe me, I look forward to that much more than you do. You have no idea how hard it is to find competent help these days, especially with something as niche as fuinjutsu." Orochimaru closes the door behind him.
I push out my water heart and just the heart. The stark white mask swings upwards as if it's on a hinge and a tentacle of black threads creeps out of my back while remaining parallel to the ground. The tentacle arcs fully around my body to bring the beating heart before me.
I daintily dip my brush into ink and start to write my first original seal onto it.
SLAM
"Oi Alvarcus come quick holy fuck man!" Kidomaru shouts once he sees me holding a thumping heart in my hands.
"Will you be quiet? I'm trying to focus here, one misstep and boom everyone is dead." Not really, but I wanted to see Kidomaru drastically pale. Which he did. Totally worth it. "Now, I've got four more hearts to go then I've got to make a handful of beacons to give to people. What do you want? This better be damn important, if it's not then turn around right now."
"Uh... when will you be done? I can wait." Kidomaru offers.
"Fine. Sit down and shut up. I don't know how long this will take." I reel my water heart back in and my lightning heart takes its place.
I've got to come up with something to stop people from barging into here. No one would dare go into Orochimaru's lab uninvited, I want mine to have the same status. But he achieved that by conducting a lot of human experiments and letting the screams of his victims scare away any prying eyes. I don't want to go down that route.
My earth heart swaps with my lightning heart.
Maybe I can set up elaborate seal traps? Tacky, but it might be effective. I don't want to waste that much time and effort though, seals take time to craft and can be very tricky. I'm going to go with something that I already know, I have so much on my plate already that I don't want to waste any time. But what?
My wind heart switches with my earth heart.
I could ask Shirokumo to make a massive web maze right in front of the door? That would keep almost everyone out, only those who are foolish would attempt to get through. Or the brave who want to test themselves. I don't want it to become a pastime activity to try and break into my lab.
My fire heart swaps with my wind heart.
Perhaps the Spiders have someone that knows some trick to help me? I don't know like a gate spider? Is that a thing? I'll have to ask. Well that might be a bad idea. I don't know how the strain of keeping that summon here indefinitely would be. A Nest Egg is nothing, but keeping someone like Arachne here for days is too much even for me.
...
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