Unbashing the brain [Open/Requesting Mednin]

[Omoi Tetsu]

Tetsu could imagine, looking up at the somehow ornately austere exterior of the old hospital, that a drunk troublemaker like him might have been locked up in a place like this a few generations ago. He wanted to give a brief toast to his imaginary fallen comrades before entering the building, but stopped himself as his hands were on the cap of his metal flask. There was work to be done here, and work that might require that he be a little bit on his toes when he found a doctor to interrogate. Partly because he'd need to remember what they told him, of course, but also because he wasn't quite sure how... Normal this sort of tactic was to come across in the medical community. If his ideas were too unique, after all, there might be a decent chance that they were bad avenues to explore, in the end.

He climbed up the cold, stone stairs at the entrance to the building, the hurried voices from within becoming ever more apparent with each step. In his pocket was the old, dead rat. It might have been a mistake to bring it with him, but in the best case scenario, the thing might have served as a useful prop, and in the worse, a prop that he could just keep tucked away, probably even without it being noticed given that rigor mortis hadn't yet had a chance to set in on the creature. He was thinking, on his way from his forest home, not only whether or not someone not on the medical tract might be politely asked to leave when they showed up, but also about just what sort of line of inquiry might get the response he wanted and needed here. He would sit in the lobby and quietly watch the various mednin staff running by; he wasn't sure what, exactly, he was looking for. Someone older, maybe, or someone who simply had a very confident sort of step. He couldn't exactly ask the receptionist who their most competent doctor was, because someone like that was unlikely to have the time or the patience for an interview. On the other hand, actually, the sort of person who had climbed to the top of a place like this was probably as egoistic as he was, and maybe even moreso, and so the opportunity to give their brilliant insight to the world might actually be just the lure he needed to catch a big fish.

"I need to speak with your most brilliant doctor." The boy said simply, after confidently marching over to the receptionist's counter.
"What do you need?" The man behind the counter asked, looking up at the boy with a confused look on his face that was rapidly turning into annoyance.
"I'd like to interview them... For a research project I'm doing."
"You look a bit old to be a student." And from annoyance to suspicion. It was rapidly becoming apparent that the time the receptionist put aside to deal with the boy was dwindling to the end of it's wick, so to speak.
"That's kind of rude, don't you think?"

Tetsu could see the rusty gears churning within the man's head, shifting to a new gear that the boy was all too familiar with. 'How do I most effectively end this conversation.' "Please fill in this form and someone will see you shortly." And the man hastily handed the boy a form before rushing off into a back room in a motion that indicated that the trek was a regular and recurring part of his day. The boy walked off in a huff, annoyed that he'd been dismissed, and even moreso that that dismissal had come with something as useless as, from his blind perspective, a blank piece of paper.

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WC: 641
[Topic Entered]

 

[Byakko Yukiin]

There were two things in this world that were infinite - paperwork and the paperwork that generated that initial paperwork. Everything else could be considered finite on a large enough scale, even the universe itself was going to eventually stretch itself so far that it was rendered into nothingness and then, presumably, recontracted into a point for the formation of a new one, but even in the blankscape of nothingness save scraps of inert molecules with only faint memories of consciousness a form for becoming formless nothingness would be making the rounds with an attached pen. 'Sign here' one nothingness would say to the other, not knowing what they were signing or why it mattered.

On that ever expanding list of finite things was the Byakko's ability to faithfully and sincerely state that he could understand the people in his own nation that he was supposed to call his comrades...they did some very strange things at times that prompted him to have to recontextualize what he knew about them. The medic was still reeling from the understanding that there were mindless savages in Tea who put pineapple on pizza and that was going to take a few more days to get over after he saw a picture of it...he'd been in Tea...what if they did that in front of him? Do you just have carte blanche to kill them? Had to be...not even human at that point...but he had to put that all aside to deal with someone tapping his facility door and asking for him to attend to someone outside who didn't belong there. They didn't need medical assistance, they'd have gone to the main floor (not that everyone did that, he didn't the first time he came either as he didn't know better), and they didn't seem to be part of the branch so they just sort of stuck their face into the fishtank and started asking which one's bite.

Byakko. Yukiin did, in fact, bite.

He groaned audibly which pitch shifted from its inhuman volume and tenor as the not-man recoiled and twisted itself back into its' man suit, adjusting the artificial skin over itself until it was snug. He spent a minute in a mirror touching up the finer details and forcing himself back into the appearances of a human being, flushing his cheeks artificially, growing muscles and vessels to simulate what he needed to pass for human, and throwing on clothes over his skin to comply with societal norms. As the last tendril slinked away and he adjusted the collars on his sleeve he stepped out into the halls as the door behind him mechanically sealed shut to keep the oppressive near zero cold away from everyone else. If the temperature of his workplace tried to equalize with anyone else's there would be a lot of dead experiments, angry people, and incredibly shot heating bills.

That which was called Yukiin fit itself neatly into that which was known as Yukiin and made both itself and its appearance known to the lobby as he sucked on a stick of pocky-like frozen coffee between his lips. He eyed the man that was described to him in the request but who was also sitting around uncomfortably like he didn't belong, would've been simple enough to pick out without the help. The silvery orbs in his head looked him over, predatory eyes gauging the threat of another creature and determining where it fell in the hierarchy before they softened into something more 'human appropriate' above the smile that accompanied it; both as fake as a top-only shot of an obese woman's dating ad in the paper.

"The most brilliant doctor we have has yet to be determined, nobody has claimed the Hat of High-great-most Doctor-man-ship."

Yukiin paused, tilting his head at someone behind the desk who hurriedly clicked a button to produce the appropriate thunderclap he'd asked for.

"...despite several rounds of competition, blackmail, and military espionage. Somebody will end up curing the Chakraless Condition at some point with two paperclips and a frog and we'll have to concede the hat to them but in the meantime you get me."

If it was a joke he didn't laugh at it, instead he produced a hand he'd kept behind his back as he took a bow and then placed a hat embroderied with "Most Adequate Doctor #3" on it. Once he'd returned back to his proper height, as small as that might've been, he tilted the hat a bit to ensure it was snugly on his head.

"Whats the bare minimum amount I have to do to make you not my problem anymore so I can get back to making a new stupid hat for the next stupid request?"

 

[Omoi Tetsu]

The boy would be lying if he said he didn't know much, but in addition to his regular breadth of knowledge, insight, and worldly brilliance, he knew, in particular, good showmanship when he saw it. The young doctor who approached Tetsu had an eerie sort of look to him, you might even call him "beautiful", in quotation marks, because it wasn't the sort of beauty you would ascribe to an attractive person, but rather the same sort you might be struck by walking by an old, dilapidated church, the type of church that might collapse if you stepped inside. The doctor was also short (short and very pale), so maybe the boy thought he looked a bit like a creepy doll. For a moment, Tetsu sat in wonder, as he thought of some of the other seemingly competent, if... Unimposing... Shinobi he'd met from cloud lately, if there was some relationship between the lack of sunlight in the mountains, or a Kumogakurean's typical diet, that made them particularly susceptible to stunted growth. Maybe the doctor knew something about that too. Maybe it was what brought him into a profession in medicine, even.

As the doctor came within introductions' distance and began theatrically announcing himself, with a thunderclap that nature (or so the boy thought) had conspired to make all the more surreal, Tetsu had to admit that he was entertained, although this momentary enjoyment was very quickly superseded by his regular way of thinking about friendly new acquaintances. That is, while the doctor was busy monologuing, Tetsu would have to make good use of this time trying to figure out if and how the man might be manipulated. It wasn't, necessarily, that he had some reason for taking advantage of the adequate doctor (although he did plan on lying to him), but a man you didn't know how to manipulate was likely in that perceived state because he'd finished figuring out how to do it to you. You should never trust a person that doesn't seem like they want anything.

And here Tetsu had found himself stumbling into a real dilemma. The diagnosis was all too clear, in fact; as timid and annoyingly humble as you'd find your average young shinobi in the main branch, the most milquetoast of even that lot seemed to separate themselves into the medical tract (with the most insufferably self-important, on the other end, pursuing Anbu, and leaving Tetsu in the middle with the most barely tolerable remainers). Anyone bold enough to even consider fielding what was probably, from their perspective, a time wasting question, would undoubtedly have to whip themselves in some private room for breaking from their responsibilities. The boy stood up, after a moment of allowing himself to enjoy the odd spectacle, and readied himself to shake the professional's hand. Whatever place this boy occupied on the totem pole, it was likely somewhere on the upper half, which meant he'd hypothetically have his hands completely filled with work, and yet he was here spending his energy on what seemed to be idly rehearsed and bizarre turns of phrases, hatmaking, and odd speculations about the nature of chakra-based talents. In other words, he was just the sort of doctor Tetsu was looking for.

The problem was that the only way to get the help of a person like that is to sufficiently interest him in a topic, and the particular topic that Tetsu wanted to have addressed may or may not see him thrown in prison, and maybe indefinitely. He probably should have looked into that first, but c'est la vie, and stopping to consider the risks never really helped anyone innovate.

"You could answer a question." The boy started, simply enough. He regretted not coming with the same sort of flare, but understatement and obscurity would have to be the appeal of his little elevator pitch here. "Supposing you could completely map out the flow of chakra within a person's brain, could you hypothetically recreate the thoughts in their head, if you were able to recreate that pattern? You could even... Make a person think a certain thought, physically, if you could see what was physically going on inside of their brain, right?" What was the maximum amount that he could incriminate himself with, the boy was thinking, that couldn't be proven before a committee here?

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WC: 723

 

[Byakko Yukiin]

"Malintent draped over your shoulder like a fox skin and you ask me about how Genjutsu works..."

It wasn't a judgment call, more a statement of fact that both parties were surely aware of but it needed to be stated regardless for any observing parties. He didn't want to be lectured for failure to observe a bad thing as it happened but he was still somewhat obligated to assist with the request, the paperwork had been sorted and he was already here so even if he intended to use this information to do something dangerous it was only his prerogative once he knew it would be used to commit a crime - vague suspicions weren't actionable.

Yukiin shifted the coffee stick from one side of his lips to the other, clicking his teeth.

"A human body, and thus any component of it from the kidneys to the brain, is made up of physical and spiritual components and both of those can already be manipulated with Genjutsu. It requires very little to no knowledge of the brain to make someone 'think a certain thought' and that achieves one of your results without any special work. As for seeing what they're thinking? We have the Yamanaka for that sort of thing. The Academy isn't stellar these days but you definitely know all that, if not you're a very presumptious Academy Student."

The medic cracked his neck with one hand, the other gesturing to a chair as one of his tendrils slipped from his collar and ensnared the furniture piece within its icy white grip, sizzling mist forming where it touched the much higher temperatures of the outside world. It was a quick jerk, split-second really, which is why he didn't really care to not do it. Most patients weren't shinobi, most patients also weren't in the research wing, so the only people here who could see it are people who either belonged here or this man asking stupid questions who opinion mattered even less.

As the chair slid into place he flopped down into it, letting it buckle under the weight that his form concealed. He was very small in this body but when you replaced all of your innards with a heavy liquid your weight tended to balloon until you were getting involuntarily recommended for weight management programs. Thankfully chairs were built to Akimichi standards these days so they wouldn't break, even if he sat in the backwards so he could drape his arms over the chair back and slouch forward. He was told this was how they did it these days and it seemed comfortable enough, why fight it?

"If you're asking if we could do this mechanically, as in without chakra or jutsu assistance, then no that is beyond the abilities of our current technology and I can't imagine it's a high priority either. Unless you've come to sell us a machine that can copy a man's brain at the snap of a finger and map it out for us, in which case I'd happily turn over my personal paycheck upon being sufficiently convinced it actually works."

He clicked out a claw on his left hand, scratching away some stray splintering from the chair's wooden components as he pulled another coffee stick from a pocket to replace the one he'd drained as he was talking over all this. Yukiin looked up at the man, pointing the clawed finger at his chest from his overtly slovenly position, hoping it might disarm the man's clear apprehension of him...not because it was unwarranted, it was very warranted around him when matters of crime and heresy were possible as he only needed reasonable suspicion of a specific crime to act on it (right now he only had a perhaps unreasonable suspicion a crime might occur, he did not yet know what crime)...but because he wasn't interested in playing fair.

Byakko, Yukiin had never played a game fairly he knew he could cheat at, what was the point? Winners lived, liars thrived, and the honest losers weren't in a position to talk much from their jail cell, grave, or impoverished street corner.

But it didn't seem like he was chatting with someone who was unaware of that so disarming tactics would only get him so far, more likely to just get him to understand that he was being observed and to mirror him instead. Not that this was a bad outcome, caution now meant that whatever he planned to do later stopped being his problem so he won either way. These were ANBU concerns, it seemed.

"What do you even want to do with me telling you what you should already know? If you'd like me to knock some memories out of your head I can find a sufficiently large rock, or hell just make one, and just start swinging, no real expertise required. I'm pretty precise with a talon too, give me a bit of time to request a couple of assistants and I can cut out whatever part of your brain is troubling you, no rocks required. I hear amnesia is quite popular these days after all."

 

[Omoi Tetsu]

In his attempts to try to mask his bad intentions while laying out enough bait for the right sort of person to lure themselves into giving him the forbidden information he required, all while wrestling with a fairly complicated idea, the boy had somehow managed to fail in communicating on all three fronts. He had completely missed the obvious parallel he was drawing with the art of genjutsu, seemed incompetent in doing so, and now found himself in a situation where the doctor not only read the undercurrent of his motivations fairly accurately, but was fielding a question that seemed, at face value, to be unbelievably simple to answer. In other words, in order to keep the ghostly doctor's interest, Tetsu would have to lay out even more bait in a situation where he was already revealing too much of his own nefarious nature.

The small man gestured towards a chair, and Tetsu heard the form of what seemed like... Something stringy quickly take form to pull a chair out for the doctor. His blind "vision" wasn't exactly perfect , and maybe there wasn't something bizarre going on with the other man, but it would also stand to reason that those with the strangest characteristics tended to climb their way up the hierarchies of the three branches. With some luck, the boy might have found himself in a similar situation, or, even better, wealthy and powerful enough to reject the opportunity. Outside of the man's odd way of moving about, Tetsu wasn't particularly interested in paying attention to him, as he seemed to be caught up in answering a question that the boy fundamentally didn't intend on asking, or at least intend on the interpretation that was currently generating a response. Rather, he was pleased that the hook essentially worked, and brought the two now into a sit-down sort of situation, which meant that, for as much as the doctor was laying out an appropriate degree of deprecation toward the boy with his answer, he was clearly bored enough to see an in-depth answer as a worthy enough use of his time.

On top of that, he was grateful for the cushion of space that the doctor's monologue allowed him for preparing a recovery for his earlier blunder, or at least an attempt at one. "I don't have a machine, and the lobotomy won't be necessary," The boy began, his eyebrow twitching as he tried to contain the limits of his annoyance at being so thoroughly lambasted. Yes, he had to admit to himself, it wasn't especially pleasant to be on the receiving end of a slew of insults being hurled at you, but this wasn't the time or place to learn a lesson like that. "I probably should have explained myself a little better," The boy threw up his hands into a casual shrug and smiled amicably, "But since the vagueness of the question seems to have caught your interest, I'm not going to regret my wording too much." Tetsu gripped the wooden armrest of the uncomfortable hospital seat, adjusting himself to prepare for the challenging task of outwardly clearing up the impression he had left with the other man regarding his character, at least to the extent he'd need for plausible deniability. "I recently nearly lost a partner during a mission. This mission, although I am bound by some secrecy not to disclose too much, required that I remain in stealth to complete it, while my partner was discovered and beaten up to the point of being knocked out, and nearly dying. I had to reveal myself in order to save her." This was all true, in fact, with a few incriminating details being carefully omitted, "You can see the dilemma I would have been faced with."

Tetsu needed to keep some of his intentions as hidden as possible, and was fortunate enough to be able to "look" at the doctor's face, to try and assess how much of what he was dishing out was being accepted thus far, without actually pointing his gaze at the man. In all honesty, what Tetsu wanted, he thought, wasn't particularly immoral. It was just illegal. What he wanted, in point of fact, is the same thing that every single shinobi has ever wanted; an edge. "And so I was thinking," The boy looked up contemplatively, pausing for the effect of this contemplation, "Chakra, when it passes through the brain, isn't like a thought that disappears when you pass out, it's a physical sort of thing. So if you can replicate a thought with chakra, it shouldn't matter whether the person is awake or not." And with this, with the moral setup and imperative in place, Tetsu felt a little more comfortable in getting to the real heart of the matter, or at least beginning down that path. "The person's brain should still be forced to think the thoughts you want them to think. And since the brain controls the body, shouldn't I be able to make my partner, in that situation, not only do something as simple as lift her arm up, say, but also wake herself up? I started reasoning that by basically forcing her brain to have waking thoughts, I should be able to channel what remains of her chakra for her, using her brain as a sort of control panel." As dangerous as this line of questioning was, it wasn't truly all that he wanted to ask, but it was a good start, and while there was reasonable enough cause, he knew, to point out the suspicious nature of the boy's questions, Tetsu also knew that it wasn't so bad that he couldn't ultimately throw his arms up in the air at any accusation and call out "I had no idea it could be interpreted in that way!" "I realized during that mission just how important some form of CPR for the brain was."

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WC: 985