naruto runs away from my problems

[Extreme breach of scientific ethics]

[Violent abuse of power]

[Method that actually doesn't obtain any information]

[Controlled double-blind studies of phenomena where that is literally impossible]

[Seeking empirical proof that a word has the meaning that it's defined as]

[Study that would have a dropoff rate of 100%]

so i think tori comes out plasticity with the idea that rules and authority are simply barriers for her to strategize around and if she gets it wrong, she dies! and then she's reincarnated and grows up in oto and this just reinforces it

i was rotating her relationship with orochimaru last night a bit, and i think she does crave his attention and approval, mostly because he is VERY good at pretending to give it and she has basically nothing in terms of positive interactions Tori felt her throat clench with a burgeoning sob, and she turned on the faucet and splashed water in her face. It would be absolutely stupid to cry over this. She knew what Orochimaru was like, after all. Withdrawing his approval had nothing to do with him liking her or not and everything to do with controlling her.  His affections are conditional, Tori reminded herself, glaring at her reflection. Water was trapped in her eyelashes. And so your affection must be too.

(and i think in reborn au, orochimaru actually does like a her quite a bit as a mentee he has during his "prove everyone i can be a kage" era, and she likes that she can use that against him.)

so tori is good at playing along but she does sincerely believe that one fuck up means horrific things could happen to her. she does not believe, trust or respect authority by itself and she is the queen of malicious compliance. she will follow orders if the reason for them is apparent or if you give an explanation she thinks is reasonable, and if you do not, she will ignore it. in the worst case scenario, you give one too many commands she doesn't like and she decides to engineer a series of events where your entire control over the situation is ripped away from you and you don't even know how.

so i think there's a good chunk of people who work with tori and think she's completely ordinary and nice. these are lab/mission leaders/whatever that are just doing their job and aren't doing anything that raises tori's hackles. there's occasional complaints from people who think tori is mouthy and full of herself for questioning them. there's a few people she's completely fucked over and they haven't even connected the dots between their own demise and her. and then there's people who think she is an absolute nightmare to work with. these are people who she's either decided she straight up does not respect and will not follow their orders unless they can defend them, or they're otherwise normal people in shit-hit-the-fan situations where tori decided the best thing to do was abc even if they demanded xyz.

(some people do in fact like this about tori. is your CO being a dick to you for no reason? tori will fix it for you. your boss's new research project is doomed to fail? tori is already standing up to explain why they're a fucking idiot)

kushina gains tori's respect by being the singular authority figure tori trusts to actually have her back. but the difference between "sensei" and "boss" is that kushina also sees it as her job to explain to tori why calls she doesn't like have to be made. and, again, tori is much more likely to accept a decision when she's given a reason that makes sense to her. she doesn't always agree with kushina and they do butt heads occasionally, but kushina sees herself more as a guide than a "my way or the highway!!!" figure, and also tori trusts her to have tori's best interests in mind

i'm working on making a cast of OCs in R&D where several are people who've been put in charge of tori and despise her. there was like 6 month gap between orochimaru fucking off (when it was announced minato was to be hokage) and minato actually getting the hat, and in that time R&D was fucking gutted and the people left behind didn't necessarily have the credentials to be leading research, but also they were good rule-following yes men and eight years later, are now the people in high level positions. just a lot of bloated, undeserved egos. this is the situation where i think tori really shines as "coworker you want in the room to verbally eviscerate your boss" and also there's several high level people who wish she would die on a mission already. tori is aware of this and it is not helping with her issues with authority. also, as she gets older, people are less and less likely to brush it off

in theory, R&D people report up a chain of command and then the head of R&D reports directly to minato. sometimes he talks to lower level people but that's about the same level as "let this rando chunin team have face time because i'm free rn and people behave better if they feel seen by their cool boss." but tori.... the higher ups in R&D complain about tori SO MUCH

and then...... a situation occurs where minato feels he needs to really assert his authority and demote her. and tori absolutely does not interpret this as "you've fucked around and now you've found out." she interprets this as "affections are conditional"

the good news is tori probably gets over the suspicion that konoha will kill her at some point. that one's less about trusting minato/konoha and more about trusting minato's adoration for kushina

the bad news is i think i set the timeline up for she gets demoted BEFORE the cave incident. also it might coincide with her discovering itachi has been secretly dating her without telling her, which is like. in hindsight that seems like an extremely itachi thing to do, but also she had some insane feelings about it at the time even if she's mellowed out about it.* so she's just like. at an all time emotional low since arriving in konoha

*it's okay with time it turns out that dating your friend who understands your specific brand of insane is actually very comfortable and nice

but post cave incident, minato takes her on as a temporary student to learn hiraishin so i think. finally. maybe. she kind of trusts the hokage? but also unfortunately she's been going to book club with him so she sees him as someone she should be allowed to just mouth off to

anyway, i was thinking about the inevitable "they both want to use edo tensei on tobirama at the time" moment. maybe she DOESN'T disobey his orders

tori: i am here to tell you i successfully resisted your direct orders not to raise the dead

minato: g-good? and is there a reason you're clutching a scroll

tori: i resisted temptation but not before i made the jutsu

minato:

tori:

minato: (sigh) do you want to raise the dead

tori: YES PLEASE

itachi: i do sleep easier at night knowing that, if it were necessary, tori would pre-empt the hokage's sudden betrayal of my trust and then come up with a way for us to dispose of him, and if i objected she and deidara would make it happen behind my back for my own good

POLL GAME: ESCAPE THE LAB!

Part of Karin Week, June 14-20! Please check out & reblog our prompts post to find out how to participate and promote. And follow us @karinweek to keep playing ;)

»»PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3««

RECAP: This is a choose your own adventure where Karin's actions are decided by poll! Karin woke up chained to a table in a room clearly meant for keeping experimental rodents. She easily escaped by knocking a guy out and has found a lab. Now she's concluded she should be stealing their research to bring back to Orochimaru.

>Go downstairs where there's no people.

Karin stepped cautiously into the hallway. There was a twitch in the chakra signature of the guy she'd knocked out, likely meaning he was regaining consciousness. She made a beeline for the staircase.

She went downstairs first. Upstairs had people, and they were mostly civilians who she could probably trick with a henge or overpower, but that would be a lot of effort. Better to check the empty floors first. Besides, her headache was steadily getting better, barely bothering her as she took the stairs two at a time. If she had to fight her way out, she wanted to do it after her healing abilities had some time to do their thing.

There were three floors below the one she was on. The lowest level was all mechanical rooms and storage of non-scientific supplies, and she left it quickly. The next floor up from that, she found a small corridor with a door at the end with an elaborate lock system of steel bars. It did not require a key and was easy enough to undo from the outside by cranking a wheel mounted in the center.

This is meant to keep something inside, Karin thought as she undid it, although this thought didn't slow her down at all. She was an ex-Oto warden and currently a lab assistant to Orochiamru. What lab thing could frighten her, let alone surprise her?

The door opened to a huge, singular lab room. A massive sight dominated the center: a huge, floor-to-ceiling tube as wide as a Hashirama tree. It must be doing something to block chakra— probably as a side effect of energy-suppression to protect lab workers from the thing inside— because how the fuck had Karin not sensed that earlier?

Oh, Karin thought. That sort of lab thing.

POLL GAME: ESCAPE THE LAB!

Part of Karin Week, June 14-20! Please check out & reblog our prompts post to find out how to participate and promote. And follow us @karinweek to keep playing ;)

»»PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3««

RECAP: This is a choose your own adventure where Karin's actions are decided by poll! Karin woke up chained to a table in a room clearly meant for keeping experimental rodents. She easily escaped by knocking a guy out and has found a lab. Now she's concluded she should be stealing their research to bring back to Orochimaru.

>Go downstairs where there's no people.

Karin stepped cautiously into the hallway. There was a twitch in the chakra signature of the guy she'd knocked out, likely meaning he was regaining consciousness. She made a beeline for the staircase.

She went downstairs first. Upstairs had people, and they were mostly civilians who she could probably trick with a henge or overpower, but that would be a lot of effort. Better to check the empty floors first. Besides, her headache was steadily getting better, barely bothering her as she took the stairs two at a time. If she had to fight her way out, she wanted to do it after her healing abilities had some time to do their thing.

There were three floors below the one she was on. The lowest level was all mechanical rooms and storage of non-scientific supplies, and she left it quickly. The next floor up from that, she found a small corridor with a door at the end with an elaborate lock system of steel bars. It did not require a key and was easy enough to undo from the outside by cranking a wheel mounted in the center.

This is meant to keep something inside, Karin thought as she undid it, although this thought didn't slow her down at all. She was an ex-Oto warden and currently a lab assistant to Orochiamru. What lab thing could frighten her, let alone surprise her?

The door opened to a huge, singular lab room. A massive sight dominated the center: a huge, floor-to-ceiling tube as wide as a Hashirama tree. It must be doing something to block chakra— probably as a side effect of energy-suppression to protect lab workers from the thing inside— because how the fuck had Karin not sensed that earlier?

Oh, Karin thought. That sort of lab thing.

POLL GAME: ESCAPE THE LAB!

Part of Karin Week, June 14-20! Please check out & reblog our prompts post to find out how to participate and promote. And follow us @karinweek to keep playing ;)

»»PART 1 | PART 2««

RECAP: This is a choose your own adventure where Karin's actions are decided by poll! Karin woke up chained to a table in a room clearly meant for keeping experimental rodents. She easily escaped by knocking a guy out and has found a lab.

>Check out what actual experiments they were running!

Morbidly curious now, Karin pulled a binder labelled RYUZAKI towards herself. Whoever this Ryuzaki person was, they kept very neat and organized notes about how different feeding regimes affected mouse chakra output. Someone named UEDA was trying to breed different mouse lines with specific mutations that they thought might affect chakra. Both SHIDOU and KINOSHITA were growing cells isolated from ninja in lab and monitoring what chakra they produced and how much, in case they could develop a new, easier research model that didn't require maintaining so many mice.

Karin had to stop and close her eyes for a bit. Her headache was clearing, but reading was still a strain. Besides, all of this was useless to her. These were basic experiments that most ninja villages had already done decades ago; they were all just too paranoid to share results with anyone, unless you were Orochimaru and you went around forcefully collecting interesting information from wayward shinobi.

Unless... cell culture with ninja-isolated cells usually didn't get very far, except in a few cases where the donor ninja had an interesting bloodline limit. Senju Hashirama's cells would do all sorts of stuff in isolation, for example. And then, Orochimaru had told her more than once with a sort of glee that Uzumaki cells had a lot of potential for such studies.

Oh my god, Karin thought. Was that why she was kidnapped, to be a cell donor? Or— she still couldn't remember why she'd been sent out here— was she supposed to infiltrate and report back, because Orochimaru would surely want to know what other scientists were doing?

Right, okay, Karin thinks, snapping open the rings of KINOSHITA'S lab notebook. This has to be what I'm supposed to be doing.

Maybe she even let herself get kidnapped! That seemed like something she would do, right? That played to her skills perfectly. She must have miscalculated something, but now she could get everything back on track. She can go home with all this stolen research and not mention losing all her memories to anyone. Orochimaru will probably even praise her!

Karin removes all the notes and protocols from the binders and assures herself that despite the mild amnesia, she's still a competent kunoichi.

She has some notes in a pile in front of her. Now she just needs to track down some biological samples. Some tubes of those cells lines, some DNA, maybe some mysterious floppy drives. The usual.

Once all the research material was piled up in front of her, Karin looked around the lab a bit. If she was going to press on exploring this place, she would need a few things.

There was a rack of white lab coats in one corner. A few of them were wrapped in plastic with the tags of a laundry service, indicating they'd be recently cleaned. She ripped the plastic off one and slipped it on. Lab coats generally had decent sized pockets, and she managed to bend the papers in half and shove them in one pocket. There: she was a little uneven, but she could carry things with both hands free.

I need a weapon, she decided. Seeing nothing obvious sitting around, she turned to the chemical cabinet. Most of the dangers here were things like "slightly increase your risk of cancer" or "slight irritant," which weren't going to deter anyone looking to seriously attack her...

She pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves before picking up a bottle of carbolic acid[1]. That could fuck you right up, she decided, if a pissed off kunoichi broke it over your head. She'd seen a fellow Oto-nin straight up die of organ failure after his lab partner freaked out and threw a bunch in his face. You know, normal human experiment turned traumatized lab assistant stuff... anyway, Karin needed this to complete her mission and not get demoted back to lab experiment. It was very important to her she was the one screaming and throwing chemicals and not the other way around.

This lab space, now that she'd looked around a bit, seemed to be more for processing whatever they were doing with the mice than the samples she thought she could feasibly bring back to Oto. She hastily went through a freezer and grabbed some DNA in test tubes, but she'd have to look elsewhere for the cell cultures.

[1] More commonly called phenol, but I picked "carbolic acid" to be more immediately evocative. Causes burns on contact with skin. Here's a case study of a poor person who suffered multiple organ failure after receiving phenol burns.