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Entry tags:
- !location: contagion containment,
- !plot: melting clock,
- !status: open,
- anwei ayles,
- clark kent,
- daniel jackson,
- faiza hussain,
- fletcher tringham,
- hellion,
- howard bassem,
- jamie hemeros,
- jamie mccrimmon,
- kanoe zouichi,
- kon-el,
- marco,
- miranda lotto,
- rachel berenson,
- rory williams,
- russel tringham,
- sakura haruno,
- sensor,
- tana moon,
- tim drake/red robin
Melting Clock: Quarantine
After Sam Henderson's announcement, the Contagion Containment and Treatment lab was going to get busy. Anyone suspected of being affected by the mysterious affliction would be brought here, and put into one of the large bubbles that would keep any potential contagious diseases in - and the patients themselves. Once in inside, they wouldn't be able to get out again until the Medical staff had cleared them.
And before they could do that, they needed to find out what was causing this - and why.
They had a lot of hard work ahead of them.
[[ooc: Just start your own sub threads under the main threads, guys! And if you're happy to have anyone tag in, put "Open" in the subject line. If you've already got plans for who you're threading with, put "Closed" instead.]]
And before they could do that, they needed to find out what was causing this - and why.
They had a lot of hard work ahead of them.
[[ooc: Just start your own sub threads under the main threads, guys! And if you're happy to have anyone tag in, put "Open" in the subject line. If you've already got plans for who you're threading with, put "Closed" instead.]]
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Ha. Bearing. "Though as a matter of public record, I only did what was necessary to try and get her to calm down." Clearly it hadn't worked, but they'd parted ways before Sakura had caught back up when Rachel had been fighting the rest of the crew who had finally brought her in. "Considering I ran into her twice, and only the second time did anyone succeed in bringing her in, make of it what you will."
Skimping on the details? Never.
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"I'd barely call it that," she said neutrally, if her lips twitched up at the corners. No smiling. That would be decidedly unprofessional, and she was supposed to still be conducting interviews here. Though she could pass this off as maintaining patient mood... sort of. "It wasn't that exciting. I body checked her when she was morphing to throw her off balance. She swung at me, I dodged, and at some point I ended up tossing her against a wall." At least early on.
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"Tossing her against a way sounds pretty impressive. That grizzly's not light," Marco noted. Then he smirked. She was making jokes! See, he knew she had a sense of humour. She just pretend that she didn't. "Come on, what next? You can't just give me the 'bare' details."
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Sakura brought her hand up to her mouth, tapping her index finger on her lips. "Sure, it's a walk in the park. Between the giant bears, humongous millipedes, and gigantic snakes, it's not like people go missing every exam year."
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Did it sound too extreme? Was that left out of these other media adaptations of shinobi, on these other worlds? Being a ninja was dangerous. Rising through the ranks wasn't for everyone, and without a certain skill-set and ability to survive and work with a team, you never did. Trying to do what you couldn't handle got you killed.
Wasn't that much obvious?
"Some small number of the genin entered die each year it's held." She didn't notice moving her arm, wrapping around her chest and holding on to her other arm. Protective. "The death rate's down from what it used to be in past generations, if that's probably in part due to the age difference. Hosting it in Konoha helps too. The Forest of Death is more forgiving than some other testing grounds."
All factual. Sakura knew all of this, had read documents with statistics on them. She'd read the unofficial law passed raising graduation age to a standardized eleven in Konoha proper.
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More than old enough for these things. By twelve, you were young enough to still be important for protecting, but old enough (and skilled enough) to help defend and protect the things you believed in as well.
"And even then, your whole team has to be rated as ready by your team leader and instructor. If they don't think you're ready, you don't get to go."
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"Your team is your fail safe. Your training. Believe me, I went through that exam twice. You have to be pretty damn stupid to get yourself killed out there," pending s-class criminals weren't stalking you down in the forest, "And it's always a choice. Nothing and no one makes you take that test." Ignoring the social pressure and the peer pressure combined.
His statement that it would be acceptable had they been under attack, without an alternative, struck her as absurd. "But it's fine if we had no choice? We can die without the right training when there's no alternative." Ignoring that he had no context for her world outside what she'd told him, and that she'd told him very little in the grand scheme of things, she couldn't believe what she was hearing. "When we're under attack in a way you recognize, then at least we can justify why people die defending the things they believe in?"
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Out of the Animorphs, Marco had always been the one who was ruthless. The one who saw the way to end goal, what needed to be done, and did it, even if doing it wasn't the 'morally' right option. But he'd never approved of killing for the sake of killing. It was never about the end justifying the means - it was about weight up the cost of acting, and the cost of not acting, and deciding which one was worse. The lesser of two evils.
Letting twelve year olds not just die, but die for no point was just not going toright with Marco.
"And sorry, but your team and training being your fail safe is bullshit. Because if you've got someone dying every exam, then that's near certain odds that the fail safes don't work for at least one person. And how many people take this exam, anyway? I'd guess not many, since most people aren't insane enough to decide to take a deadly test. Which means the percentage of people dying probably isn't negligible, and your fail safes are failing too often."
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She let go of her death grip on her own arm, ticking off each section with a finger. "The second part takes place over five days. Everyone's your theoretical enemy, and even then, the likelihood of anyone coming after you with killing intent is low. Possible, and it's happened, but low."
Sakura forced herself to keep a level tone. She mostly succeeded, falling into a lecturing cadence familiar to her over the years. "Another half of the remaining teams don't finish that test, unable to complete mission objectives. Now you're generally down to twenty-some odd people at most, or nine if it's been a brutal year. They want nine or less for the final test-round no matter what, so if more people came through than can be showcased at the end, you end up fighting in preliminary rounds. Those are the one on one fights, randomly assigned. It's one of the few pieces of obvious technology you'll find back home, the machine that generates the fighting pairs."
She was explaining far more than she'd ever intended to, and in part as an effort not to end up shouting. You have no idea what you're talking about! Quarantine wasn't the place, and this wasn't the time. She didn't think there would ever be a time.
She continued on. "When you have your final nine, or eight, or whoever ends up qualifying, they have a month to train for the final tournament. Fights are randomized again, and in an ideal exam there's one final winner. Which doesn't matter. The third exam isn't about winning, it's about conduct. The Kage of any given village decides who qualifies as chuunin based on their performance in the final test, and a win or a loss isn't what makes that decision for you."
Looking squarely at Marco, she closed her hand into a fist. No more counting off. "You want to discuss tactical gain? Do you have any idea what the chuunin exam stands in for?" It was a rhetorical question. There was no way he could. "War. The five nations settled on the rotating exam in order to find a safer means of demonstrating to the world at large who's worthy of patronage. We're hired fighters, Marco. Mostly hired to fight against other shinobi, or to safeguard people or wares, but hired nonetheless. We're only as self sufficient as we are successful in drawing in customers."
All things which Sakura knew, but the disconnect between recognizing the absurdities and finding them abhorrent (the world she lived in was so much less violent than it had been even ten years before) was noticeable. "It doesn't take an exam to get people killed. All it takes is one person lying about the ranking level of a mission, because they're too cheap or too hopeful to spend what they need on the skills that'll keep them alive. And in regards to the percentage of people dying on one exam? The one that stands in for the small-scale wars that used to be fought? The highest has been five percent." In recent history. "Compared to the dozens of dead you used to end up with, compared to knowing that you can trust your life to the shonobi who pulled through the exams and was seen as qualified to move up in rank? You tell me if that doesn't seem negligible. Not acceptable, but negligible. When you know some countries used to have genin classes fight to the death for one promotion to chuunin, you tell me that there's no tactical advantage in instituting a better control over how the shinobi world interacts with its different parts. In promoting team activities first, and saving individual confrontations for last."
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He'd already made a pretty good guess that Sakura's world was insane. What had hadn't realised though, was that her world was INSANE.
"And naturally, instead of using more reliable methods of proving the quality of your fighters, like say, the statistics of your success rates or matches between more experience ninjas, you rely on...the twelve year olds. The least experienced, the ones who just started, and are the most likely to screw up. They're the ones you're counting on to tell the rest of the world how awesome you guys are. Did I get that right, or is there some other completely insane part of all this that I've missed?"
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But still. Twelve year olds? Seriously? Geez, Marco might have started fighting a war at thirteen, but at least none of them had ever tried to pretend that was normal.
"You could go put itching powder in Mean Rachel's bubble for me," he said instead.
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She hadn't bothered explaining, but that hadn't been what he'd asked. If I got anything wrong, you should tell me. Two could play at word quibbling games.
She bowed, an overly formal way of ending their conversation. "Please inform any of the staff here should you start experiencing undue stress, or require any kind of providable assistance. We'll inform you of our progress as it becomes relevant. Thank you for your cooperation."
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So Marco returned her politeness with a very impolite gesture. Namely the finger.
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Maturity was overrated.