towerofanimus | 1st String | Exploring the Tower

Characters: Kankuro and YOU!
Setting: Room 3-06, various other points of interest.
Format: Starting out with prose, but I'll follow your lead if you'd rather action tags.
Summary: A really grumpy puppeteer wakes up and explores.
Warnings: Pottymouth? Will update as appropriate.

[Room 3-06]

Well, that was one of the more unpleasant awakenings Kankuro had experienced in his life -- and he'd had more than his fair share! Sleep paralysis, his mind informed him, even as he looked about the room to get his bearings. Not something he'd ever felt before. If he was lucky, he never would again.

But that paled in importance next to the location. This was not where he'd left the war! Nor was it his cramped but familiar room in the Facility...

So it wasn't home, wasn't the Facility -- this was somewhere else altogether, some new fresh hell he would have to learn and endure. And one where it looked like he wouldn't even have the same level of privacy, if the other beds in the room were any indication. He wouldn't have that refuge of locking himself away from everyone.

He forced himself to calm, to push aside the thought of roommates as a minor irritation, inspecting the room around him more thoroughly. The trunks at the foot of the bed -- he would explore his in a moment. These letters, meanwhile...

He picked them up and started to read, and only a minute or so later had his conclusion.

"Bullshit."

[Cafeteria]

Dressed and painted up, it was time to head out. The first stop? Food.

So this was it for his first meal, huh? Kankuro stared at the bowl of oatmeal, making a decidedly unimpressed face at it. It didn't seem all that impressed by him, either. Truth be told, he was reassured, in a vague sort of sideways way, at how unappetizing it looked. He'd grown up with desert legends full of the dangers of enchanted food offered in unnatural realms, food that transformed you or bound you away from your people and your home, but those legends always went out of their way to cast the food as seductively appetizing. The whole point was you wanted to eat it, enough that you didn't think about the dangers or the consequences. This? Well, if it was meant to be temptation, it was doing a piss-poor job of it, in his estimation. He wouldn't feed this crap to a jackal.

Though maybe this place just believed in the stick, rather than the carrot. Forcing you to starve to death or vomit up anything else you ate until you dug into the oatmeal... well, he would have to eat sooner or later. Starving to death over and over didn't exactly sound like his idea of dealing with another twisted, unnatural imprisonment.

He stuck the spoon in the mess, then stirred it around a few times. Food wasn't supposed to look like that, like some lump of half-watered clay...

[The Art Gallery]

Now that he'd eaten, Kankuro was set to do some exploring. This place was a hell of a lot more extensive than his last torture chamber away from home, and as a consequence, he's warier. There's a big mass of something wrapped in white and carried by a strap slung over his shoulder -- for those who know him, yes, he's gone back to his old way of carrying a puppet around for this first session of exploring, and those who know him well can probably guess at why.
He found his way to the art gallery, and decided to take a look through it. At first, it was just a curiosity, whetted by his interest in all things artistic. Much of the art showed him worlds far different from his own, some of them filled with fantastic machines or warriors. That was pretty cool. And art in general did fascinate him. But as he kept moving deeper into the gallery, through the maze of walls set up to display the most art possible, he noted the paintings getting darker, more twisted, more grotesque.

For a while, it didn't bother him. He was hardened to a lot -- both as a ninja, and as a child growing up watching his psychotic little brother squish people who annoyed him. Hell, the twisted Akasuna puppets were his favorites, ever since he was a little apprentice picking out his very first. He liked dark and ugly.

But then he came face to face with an image he couldn't make himself enjoy. His own face stared at him blankly from the canvas, brilliant purple paint in the same design he'd brushed onto his skin not two hours ago laid here not over flesh but over finely-polished wood -- a joined mouth with a faint hint of metal gleaming from between the barely-parted lips -- inhuman glass eyes full of mute horror.

It was his nightmare from the Facility all over again, and he recoiled with a quick, shaking few steps and a faint clatter of puppet joints.

[The Cathedral]

Well, this was better than the art gallery -- and better than most of the other floors, at least so far as he can tell. His world didn't have buildings like this, but all the same, something about it appealed to him, and he paused there, staying close to the staircase, just listening to the wordless murmurs and taking in the majestic structure. Here, he could pause and just try to let his thoughts settle a little.

The murmurs didn't faze him much; he wasn't moving far, and the murmurs stayed murmured, the feeling of the invisible, silent presences keeping their attention off him. A good place to find a puppeteer with his mysterious bundle.