Kapitel 2718: 108
Modifying one of the flying island's secondary arena areas into a 'battle of the bands' area had been reasonably simple, all things considered. Mostly because the additional arenas didn't have the energy-hungry variable environment trick and were thus much easier to dismantle. They only needed five individual stages for the bands, assuming they wanted all of them able to perform without having to change out things on a single stage. If they wanted to go that route then a single larger stage was more appropriate.
He put six total stages in, one big one and five smaller ones. Those handling the whole thing could decide how they wanted to use it all.
It had been a simple distraction from bringing in all the dirt. You underestimated how much dirt it took to cover a significant portion of an artificial moon's surface at your own peril, and their prepared dirt had only been the beginning. Luckily they were also filling in a bunch of areas with water and capping others off for future expansion. The water was coming from other-dimension oceans they could drain water out of with little problems, but for the initial stages of things they still needed to bring in over a hundred trillion cubic meters of dirt to allow the seal-boosted trees enough room for their deeper root systems.
Luckily, the only non-construction 'plans' so far involving the moon were Hinata's test flights of shuttles.
Gamabunta watched the crystal ball as it showed Jiraiya being himself, making a fool of himself to cause others to underestimate him and probably trying to 'forget' his disappointment. "So, I hear you gave him...unwelcome news."
"Doing so in any other way would've invited issues," Gamamaru replied.
"Amusing issues or horrifying issues?"
"A mixture. A few mentions of things near little Ruri had the potential for her to decide that she wanted to be like her mother, correcting for that could've resulted in her deciding to use a random other kunoichi or to 'fix' his problems by trying to turn him into a woman. For all I know she'd have been successful, but I can't be certain because he wouldn't live long enough to find out."
Yep. That was definitely a mixture of possibilities. "I suppose going through all the possibilities just led to worse things?"
"Fundamentally, they just don't know how the child's mind works. Attempts to explain things to her are far too likely to fail and they won't realize it until it's too late."
"Sounds like she might be quite the troublemaker in a few years."
"By then she should start internalizing some of Tsunade's lessons and will be less...impulsive. Especially when it comes to children, though that will be helped by learning how annoying a young child can be once her sister is more mobile."
"Ah."
Ino looked over the promotional materials for the 'battle of the bands'. They'd had two more non-shinobi bands decide that they wanted to participate, bringing the total up to seven. Each band had been brought to the flying island and the first five had each claimed the smaller stages. That left the larger stage to be shared by the two additions, but they were okay with that as they were used to far smaller venues.
Each band had now done two songs each on camera, which were being broadcast periodically between moon progress updates. They were also staying on the flying island for the moment, getting regular practice in...and she believed that the four shinobi bands were working on a larger 'act' to play things up and make the civilian bands look like chumps. Something she approved of, including that it was being done across village lines, but she'd not paid enough attention to know what they were likely to do ahead of time. She was playing announcer and figured that having a more genuine reaction to things was the better option there.
Tickets for the event would go on sale in just over two weeks, spread through the various 'homes' of the participants. Five countries as primary sellers, though Uzushio's share was going to be a bit more broadly sold after their internal sales were completed.
"You decided to go all out on this," Yoko commented as she looked over the design for a large shrine-styled 'shuttle'.
"Can't have the gods traveling in just anything," Hinata replied.
"And this would probably be safer than flying the island out to the moon and hoping that the atmospheric containment holds up."
"...the what?"
"The flying shrine island. I've not had a lot of use for it, but had considered it as an option for the show of an enshrinement trip to the moon."
"Those are capable of flying into space?"
"Yes? The first flying island was able to go into space in testing before it was revealed and I've been upgrading the shrine version with added safety features as we come up with them."
"But...they aren't...hmmm."
"You're just realizing that the moon itself is theoretically incapable of holding an atmosphere on its own and yet we're starting to grow plants on the surface."
Hinata nodded. "Yeah. And none of the islands have had issues with changes in air pressure as they go higher in altitude. I just hadn't considered that the spells could likely handle vacuum. And now I kind of want to see you make the trip that way."
"That would probably require putting too many people at risk if something did go wrong. Justifying a smaller contingent as being required due to the constraints of a space-capable ship is also going to make it less annoying to deal with those along for the ride."
"I suppose that isn't a bad point on its own, but it's far less impressive."
"I'd rather focus on safety than being impressive, though I suppose adding domes so that atmospheric containment spells aren't required could work."
Hinata looked at her, then at the computer screen, and snorted. "We're definitely helping you set up the island for the trip instead, because that will far more impressive."
Now it felt like mentioning that the islands could go into space had been a mistake, even if the point about it being more impressive was entirely accurate.
Mei shook her head as she looked between the screen and the moon in the night sky. You could see the forest areas growing in places without the feed showing other work going on to prepare more areas. The entire project had gone far beyond the legends of the Sage of Six Paths and what he could do in centuries gone by, though it was being done by someone with the same eyes that the Sage was said to have had.
The plans apparently included the pentagon facing the planet being what would amount to a small city, with farming and such available, paired with another facing away from the planet on the opposite side. The other ten pentagons were being split between 'forest' and 'ocean' style areas, and the ninety smaller triangles between the twelve pentagons were either getting obvious caps or miscellaneous installations. Everything else appeared to be thin lines from the planet, but were likely the equivalent of large roads when you were actually on the moon itself.
Uzushio had stopped 'living up to the history of the Uzumaki' and seemed to have decided that said history wasn't insane enough. Removing chakra entirely, granting bloodlines, building flying islands, teleportation networks, building a moon...
It was all far beyond anything she personally thought should be reasonable, and there had to be something else that had triggered some of it. Even if you assumed a couple decades of hiding while working on things that didn't explain the speed with which they were now progressing at...or that someone who had been born and living in Konohagakure seemed to be at the forefront of far too much of it.
"Six hours," Ao called out as he approached.
"...what?" Mei asked, narrowing her eyes.
"It took six hours to sell out of tickets for the 'battle of the bands'."
Oh. Right. She'd forgotten about that, a civilian group having reached out to the village about possibly getting into the mix there. She had a small stack of tickets that were going to those that had been helping the civilians with transportation, but honestly didn't think that the band was going to impress enough people. Their recorded performance was...lacking compared to the other six bands and she was probably skipping the event so as to not be present when they were trounced.
Wame was wide-eyed as she manipulated the joystick to zoom in closer. "Holy shit."
"Impressive, isn't it?" Odoroki asked.
"You can make out lightning strikes in the atmosphere of this gas-covered planet!"
"Yep, though apparently this has created a storage issue."
That brought her up short. "Storage issue?"
"There isn't enough data storage available to have full-resolution pictures of everything the spell is picking up."
"Oh."
"Teams are working on solving that problem, but it's an effective seven megameter telescope with how your spell spreads out. Nearly omnidirectional the way Naruto set it up too, only missing the Earth by a couple of degrees at times, so it can scan everything 'away from the planet' at all times."
"...it's not focused specifically on this gas giant?"
Miho snorted and turned on four other screens, manipulating them to lock them onto other objects throughout the star system. "Processing restrictions limit to live feeds from at most ten points in the observation bubble right now, but they can be anywhere the bubble can currently see."
"Woah. From my spell?"
"Yep."
"...that's why I have a line item in my pay attributed to 'very happy scientists', isn't it?"
Odoroki nodded. "Yep. You're getting ten percent of the fees they're paying for access to the feeds over the next five years."
Thinking back to the obscene number that had been on the pay slip, and that it was apparently only a tenth of what the scientists were paying, had her going wide-eyed.
"Naruto is a bit annoyed that he's needing to outfit one of the two 'living areas' on the moon as more of a scientific outpost," Futo chimed in. "Though I suspect only because he didn't consider how many scientists were going to want to leap at the chance to work on things out there. Well, that and there are entire teams of scientists wanting to defect to Uzushio now that it's blatantly obvious that everyone else is in the dark ages by comparison."
Gesu grinned as the bands were being introduced, having heard rumors that there was going to be something more spectacular than just the bands trying to put on a better performance than each other. The main stage and the stage to the left of it had the 'civilian' groups, all clustered together, but the more interesting side of things were the four 'hidden village' groups. Uzushio had two, on the ends of the four, with Konoha and Iwa having a group each in the middle.
Those four let the three other groups go first. Not even heckling like the three civilian groups were doing, though it was possibly just the hidden village groups being more confident. Their recorded performances were more impressive looking at least, assuming you could get beyond the animal features three of the four groups had. Then again, it wasn't as if those were any worse than some of the costumes he'd personally seen other groups wearing.
Six songs, four decent and a couple mediocre, from the civilian groups had been followed by one of the Uzushio bands starting up. Unlike with the civilian groups, it was blatantly obvious that chakra was in use here as waves of colors flowed from the instruments, forming an image of full-animal versions of the band members playing their instruments in the air over the band itself. That hadn't happened on the recorded performances, though it was possible that the cameras couldn't pick up the effect.
Then, breaking from the 'one band at a time' script, the Iwa drummer on the next stage appeared to decide that they were offended at the Uzushio drummer's performance. They interjected with their much deeper, louder drums, somehow adding to the performance from the Uzushio band. The tone of things changed at that point, even the full-animal versions of the Uzushio band giving the Iwa drummer a 'are you kidding us?' look before the Uzushio drummer shifted tactics into an incredibly complicated ten second performance.
The Iwa drummer was not intimidated, duplicated the performance on their own drums with their band playing lightly to back them up, and extended it another five seconds. This went back and forth a couple of times before the Iwa band seemed to form a set of rock golem dancers and the two bands dropped into a seamless challenge and response style routine as though they were a single larger group.
...which went on for a couple of minutes before the Konoha group joined in. They had brass instruments that the other two didn't, and in the recordings a very different style, but their opening notes both drew attention and blended in with the other two at the same time. In their case, the sound itself felt like it was moving around on its own, instruments somehow hitting only one of his ears and the harp they had sounded almost like it was being played underwater in a haunting fashion. With three bands there was now a bit of a rotation, each one picking up from the one before in a cycle with the other three playing more 'background' roles as the focus and overall style of play shifted around.
Four cycles in, instead of looping back to the first Uzushio band, the second Uzushio band jumped in. They had a similar trick with an image of full-animal versions of themselves appearing in the air over them, except that the image reached out to and merged with the one from the first group and the animals started fighting with their instruments. As one of the two groups 'took focus' their animals would get the upper hand in the fight, but when the Iwa or Konoha groups were 'in focus' the battle seemed to shift to more of a stalemate.
A good twenty minutes later the first Uzushio group 'broke off' as they handed focus off to the Iwa group, and as the focus shifted to the Konoha group the Iwa group did the same. Things eventually ended with the second Uzushio group playing alone for a couple of minutes before finishing up. Then the Iwa group started to play solo, their rock golems dropping into a more complicated dance routine, before the Konoha group joined in and the two groups blended their individual styles for a bit. The Iwa group then broke off and let the Konoha group play solo, for the same amount of time the Iwa group had.
The show wasn't over though, as the two Uzushio groups then started up again, their illusionary versions of themselves merging over the other two groups as they played in sync with one another instead of in competition with each other, their animal counterparts in the image above the bands now cooperating instead of fighting.
Kize was pouting at this point as the four hidden village bands demonstrated how working together could let them completely and utterly steal the show. She eventually shook her head. "We really shouldn't have taunted them so much."
"Probably," Munkei agreed from where he'd sat down. "But you have to admit that even individually they're doing better than we did."
"Thanks to tricks that we have no hope of matching."
"We claimed that we could beat them despite their tricks, though I don't know if they should be counted as four bands or one giant one."
Gotaka snorted. "Each of them has their own 'style', but they're skilled enough to blend those styles in basically every combination. Either they've been practicing together for years or they're genuinely better musicians than we are before taking into account that everyone with an instrument supporting it is jumping around the stage in various ways. The only thing they've not done yet is sing, and I don't think the bulk of the audience has even noticed that detail."
"Well," Kize said. "Lyrics would make blending things harder."
"True."
"And we know they can sing from watching the performances that were recorded."
Onoki shook his head as one of the Uzushio bands finally started a proper solo act with their singers in play. "So each village has a specialty. Our rock golem dancers, Konoha with incredible displays of control over the sounds their instruments produce, and Uzushio generating visible illusions with their music."
"And they all proved they can work together to utterly humiliate a shared opponent," Naruto added. "Which is commendable for shinobi from a web of village alliances."
"Only the rock golems probably show up properly on recordings though," Shisui noted.
"Konoha's tricks are the hardest to capture on recordings, but we've done our best to. You need to wear headphones to get something close to the full effect. The goal is at least partially to prove that each group needs to perform in person for the best experience though, which I think they've done a good job of."
"They've definitely done that," Onoki agreed, idly wondering if the other two were going to be using their groups as a potential cover for infiltration work. If so, they'd probably already started on the relevant training instead of only planning on starting that once the groups had proven themselves. Then again, Uzushio seemed to specialize in infiltration at times and probably trained everyone in it. In comparison, Konoha had enough people to throw at things to make it a non-issue if they had a high fail-out on the courses.
That Iwa's group here was standing on apparently equal footing with the other two villages was honestly impressive on its own, and the four groups had very obviously impressed the crowds present. Not to mention shamed the rest of the continent regarding how they handled performances.
Orochi had become the de facto go-between for civilian scientists working with Konoha and Uzushio. She wasn't sure how much of it was over half of them coming into the relationship with the villages through the Otogakure merger and how much of it to give her something productive to do in order to keep her out of trouble.
As if she had enough free time to get into trouble with Ruri and Mito to worry about.
This led to sitting with Mito while flipping through requests for access to Uzushio's new 'Moonscope' alongside output from that system. It was incredibly impressive, and basically every scientist on the continent with any interest in space was clamoring for access to it. This was incredibly low security right now, but she was looking for signs of possible problems for those wanting to relocate to the moon instead of just getting access to live output feeds and collected data.
Admittedly, the data feeds were labeled as a military concern by Uzushio, but from an 'early warning' point of view as the planet had known essentially-hostile visitors from elsewhere in the past. More eyes on things was a good thing so long as they reported oddities, which was likely even without asking as they requested more focus on anything spotted.
The limited infrastructure for processing the output was being worked on, but until it could be expanded upon there was a fully-understandable premium being charged for access to the limited data feeds. One that the scientists were definitely willing to pay on the whole, and supposedly there were outright bidding wars for slots. That was being handled directly by Uzushio though, so she had no say in things.
Finishing her review of the last application, she only had two that she felt needed more investigation. Not that she'd be doing that part of things.
Naruto sighed as he looked over the list of requests. "I did too good of a job building stages."
"Yep," Ino replied.
"And now over twenty venues want to hire Uzushio to build new performance areas for them."
"With you being the only one in the village with experience doing so, yes."
"Do we have any volunteers to work with me on the first couple so that they can attempt the rest without me?"
She dropped folders on the table. "Plenty."
"I need to finish up some of the 'more processing systems for the Moonscope' work first."
"Already warned the venues that other projects are currently higher priority. A couple tried offering more money until I quoted what some of the scientists are paying out. Er, a couple did ask about projecting the Moonscope feeds onto ceilings of dining areas though."
"...fun. They'll need to deal with copies of what someone else is already focusing on because I'm not dedicating feeds to that kind of use."
"I predicted that and have some of the legal teams working on contracts."
It was annoying how side projects turned into primary projects with their own side projects, but thinking back on things that was a long chain of projects.
Going through the requests, he was able to quickly write up some concerns about a couple of the venues and mark one as a definite no because they had too many ties to crime groups Uzushio didn't like the existence of. Then he flipped through the list of potential volunteers, but figured that actual choices would need to happen closer to when the work was going to be done. He also suspected that he was going to be setting up a larger venue or two elsewhere. Maybe on the island being gradually built out as a resort destination by others? Plus almost certainly one on the moon when they got to the point of having people visiting.
Shisui looked at the stack of forms. "These are requests for our one band to perform places?"
"With or without any of the other three," Hiashi agreed. "It's looking like it could make the village a general profit without the infiltration component."
"Instead of the assumption that we'd be running it at a slight loss due to the infiltration benefits."
"It helps that our group's solo performance showed that they're more suited to a number of formal events and the lack of flashy visual tricks means that special venues with more sightlines and space aren't required."
A quick flip through the stack showed that there were several weddings, a couple of events the Daimyo was running, foreign leaders of various kinds running their own events, and a general request for a funeral 'when it becomes necessary'. Which was an interesting request on its own. "This isn't what I expected when I signed off on forming potential groups."
Hiashi snorted. "None of us expected this kind of response, or that level of dedication to putting on good shows by those involved. Of course, Uzushio has started up a dozen other similar programs, some more obvious than others, and continues to leave everyone else in the proverbial dust as a result."
"Go outside and look up at the sky when the moon is visible to see how far beyond the rest of us they are. A single pass over the surface gets them incredibly up to date maps on anything and everything visible from orbit, but everyone is focused on their ability to get good looks at other planets."
"Well, they admittedly haven't advertised that side of things. Anyone with a brain has realized it can be pointed back at the surface and we know at least two villages have started doing things when the moon isn't visible to compensate."
"I bet they'll panic a bit if the 'communication satellite system' that Uzu's technology division has proposed gets implemented, assuming anyone notices."
Teni looked up as the Uzukage entered the room. "Good morning, sir!"
"You don't need to be that formal with me," he replied.
"You're here on official business and I'm hoping for approval to test the first satellites."
"So I've heard, with you wanting to market it as something civilians could tap into."
She nodded. "Yep. Nothing fancy needed on their part, instead of the special seal links that most of our long-range stuff uses, so there can be actual competition for manufacturing as people get up to speed with things."
"I don't like the idea of sticking a bunch of cameras on them."
That made no sense. "Everyone who finds out about them is going to assume we have cameras on them anyway. We gain nothing from not doing so."
He shook his head. "How many cameras feed into the Moonscope?"
She paused as she considered that. "Oh. An extra spell processor or two and we'd get a hundred times better images than any camera we have access to."
"Yep."
"That spell is terrifyingly useful."
"Well, there's also the 'scan everything inside of this grid' spell that was cooked up by the spells division for other purposes, but with some tweaking should work from an orbital grid if the math is right and it doesn't scale differently than expected. Who knows what else might come up with in the future that we'd want to pass through generic spell processors."
"Oooh." She then paused, and looked over at the prototype satellite. "I need to start from scratch on the design."
"I tested a copy. You need bigger antennas too for the 'transmit back' pieces. Most people aren't going to have things as sensitive as our equipment, at least not for a while."
Crap. That was a very good point. How had she forgotten that?
"Also," he continued. "The stationkeeping systems need to be larger."
That had her frowning. "But if they're too big then getting them into position will be prohibitive."
"...Teni, we have teleportation spells. If I can build a moon in distant orbit then we can get basically anything into lower orbits. The only problem is keeping them there."
"Oh. Right." The seals division was supposedly just as bad about considering things outside of their own areas for this kind of thing, but it was probably less embarrassing for them to forget details like that. Doubly so when the stationkeeping systems were intended to be spells already.
An hour later she had a list of other issues with the prototype, such as it being too dependent on external power. Adding in solar panels to generate local power would help with that, but it also needed power storage...
Hoshi had been Naruto's personal summon, then kind of switched to being Yoko's alongside Suzu, to both him and Suzu being more general trainers and contacts for the entire clan as they somewhat transitioned to working with the shrine network while raising kits.
...which now put him in the running for leading the clan, alongside Suzu.
"It seems odd that we're being considered," he said as he watched the kits interacting with some of the younger shrine maidens in training.
"We're the ones seeing the most benefits from the contract," Suzu retorted. "Which is also showing in our kits, at least according to the others. I can feel that they've got stronger chakra than most kits and the healers say they're aging more gracefully than the rest of the clan. Some of that is also showing in us, which the elders didn't expect."
"That shouldn't be enough to have us considered as leaders."
"...you're also the only one in the clan that fully understands that stupid computer interface on the summoning contract. In that respect you're practically a leader already."
He shook his head at that. "That's a horrible justification for making me the overall leader. It justifies being in charge of those going to the shrines, not leading the entire clan."
She gave him a look that said he was being stupid. "The clan has pivoted so that being in charge of those going to the shrines is essentially being in charge of the clan as it is. We've had more outside contact thanks to that than the entire history of the clan before it, and twenty lesser contracts with those in the shrines that clicked with specific foxes."
"None of which was really my doing. Naruto and Yoko, but not really me."
"It's better for the kits if you're more important."
Okay, she'd dropped into 'no longer explaining it' mode. He might have to hunt down a rabbit for her to apologize for being dense...
Guren sighed as she examined the crib that Aitu had been in. "I think you assembled the crib wrong."
"I didn't assemble the crib at all," Tayuya retorted. "I paid a team to assemble it for me because I was days away from giving birth."
"Huh. Well, I can see several problems, and at least one broken bracket because of them, so I'm going to go find a replacement for you. Maybe a smaller basket for short-term use until a proper crib can be assembled for you."
"...thank you."
"You're welcome. Was the team a genin team or from the people you bought the crib from?"
"Genin team."
"Then I can look up who it was to file a complaint because I doubt you kept the paperwork."
"Of course I kept the paperwork."
"...you kept the paperwork?"
Tayuya stood up, shifting Aitu a little, and headed out of the room. A minute later she came back with a sheet of paper. "Here you go."
"Who are you and what did you do with the crass 'paperwork is for chumps' Tayuya?"
"As if Orochimaru-sama would've let me keep that attitude for real. He just liked seeing how many idiots followed my 'lead'."
"You...pretended to dislike and never fill out paperwork?"
"Dislike? Didn't have to pretend. But after being made to redo sixty boxes of other people's nasty forms to find one sheet Orochimaru-sama needed? I learned the benefit of properly-filed and stored paperwork."
Ooooh. Guren hadn't known that had been Tayuya digging through things. Anyone going through that would probably hate paperwork, but it made it trivial to see how one might see it as a necessary evil afterwards.
Wöchentlicher Energiestatus
-- Power-
Rangliste 
-- Power-
Stein