3rd String | Getting Home Late | [Language: slightly warped Japanese]

[dance_mypuppets]

Characters: Kankuro and anyone who cares to help out
Setting: Between Floor 15 (workshop) and the elevator
Format: Starting with action, will match
Summary: Kankuro stays too late in the workshop -- oh boy, time to head back to the dormitory at night.
Warnings: Will update as appropriate.

[It's a bad habit Kankuro has always possessed; he starts tinkering with his puppets, and the next thing he knows, it's nighttime -- and he knows, by now, just what that means. Getting back to the dormitory to get a proper sleep is going to be... interesting.

Good thing he's finished up his new work -- and time to take his newly upgraded pretty for a spin. It's Kuroari that's gotten the upgrade treatment this time; she usually doesn't get to take center stage here in the Tower's environment, so he's curious to see how she does.

But once he sets foot outside the workshop, he almost immediately finds himself face-to-face with one of the bigger bads the Tower can throw at him.]

Fuck! Little bastard, you were waiting for me, weren't you...

[The language, if anyone hears him, is understandable Japanese, but heavily accented and just a little... off, as though it were a divergent dialect from no part of Japan anyone's heard of.

This isn't the way he likes to jump into combat! Approaching from a distance is his style, so he has to get out of the way of swiping claws before he can even think about bringing his puppets properly into things.

Anyone else out late willing to help out an ambushed ninja?]

Comments

[dance_mypuppets]

Oh good, someone else. Kankuro threw a quick eye over her, trying to decide if she looked like she could hold the thing's attention -- and decided that for a moment, yes.

"I'm armed," he said quickly. "Just distract it a moment, could you?" He could get clear, get his puppets summoned again -- dammit, he needed to start keeping one out of the scroll all the time again -- and rejoin. Once he was properly armed... well, he wasn't gonna say it would be easy, since the monster was fast and almost certainly venomous, but it should go down with a fight.

[tohko_amano]

"I will! Don't worry!" Tohko yelled before throwing a dagger at the monster's back. Since the monster had heard her, it managed to dodge so that only some flesh off it's back was cut off before the weapon fell to the ground. However, the monster was now interested in her, and while Tohko had been hoping to get the knife in the creature's back, the main reason she had done that was so that the monster would rush at her and give this guy some time.

She prepared herself as the monster rushed towards her. She'd go for the hands, the eyes, the neck, and the chest once it was within striking distance.

[dance_mypuppets]

Good, she'd gotten its attention -- now to make sure it didn't kill her! Now clear, Kankuro slapped down two scrolls, sending Sasori and Karasu darting toward the monster, the puppets' joints giving a soft, ominous rattle. With the girl there, and the close quarters, he wasn't going to try using poison gas or a spread shot of weapons; instead, the blades in Karasu's hands and Sasori's blade-tipped belly cable both darted out to slash at the thing, the puppets veering to either side of it to distract it from her the way she'd distracted it from him.

[tohko_amano]

While the puppets looked a little weird, Tohko was glad that they were rushing at the monster. This guy seemed to know what he was doing. The monster, momentarily distracted by the puppets, turned toward them, and Tohko, seeing an opening, lunged forward with her dagger, intending to stab the monster in the neck.

[dance_mypuppets]

Seeing her move, Kankuro drew back Karasu slightly, covering her while she went in for the slash; even if she wasn't someone he'd fought with before, he knew teamwork.

The creature snarled as her knife caught it -- all the worse, it wasn't an immediate death wound, but it was bleeding heavily now, and obviously weakening within minutes.

"Good," Kankuro called to her. "Fall back - it should go down on its own!"

[tohko_amano]

Darn. The creature hadn't died immediately, but with all the blood it was losing, it would die within five or ten minutes. Tohko quickly pulled her dagger out and called back to the guy.

"Right! If you survive, please, pick up my dagger and meet me three floors down!"

And with that, Tohko began to run, hoping that the guy would be alright.

[dance_mypuppets]

"Got it!" Oh, he'd be fine now -- the thing took a few tottering steps after her as she ran, but Kankuro interspersed his puppets between the monster and the fleeing girl, and they were able to hold it off long enough that it slumped down, quickly dying.

An errant chakra thread wrapped around the dagger and brought it to Kankuro's hand, and he sealed Sasori away again, leaving Karasu to drape over his back like some sort of weirdling piggyback ride, and he set off after her. Three floors down...

[tohko_amano]

There, Tohko was waiting for the guy, watching the universe constantly be made, destroyed, and made again. She knew it wasn't real..but it reminded her a little bit of Wilhelm. She was starting to get a little worried about the guy when he actually showed up, one of his pupped draped over his back. Probably to take out any more monsters that decided to show up. She smiled when she saw him walk in.

"Thank goodness. I was starting to get a little worried about you up there. Hey, are you hurt at all?"

[dance_mypuppets]

"Not a bit, thanks to you," he said with an easy grin. "Kankuro's the name, by the way. Shouldn't have let it get the drop on me like that; I was getting careless." It was a good thing she'd happened to hear him; he needed to get better about getting back to the residential floors before nightfall, such as it was.

[tohko_amano]

"Well, that's good. And don't worry about it. That's happened to me every now and then. And it's nice to meet you, Kankuro. I'm Tohko Amano, the book girl." The only reason Tohko had survived such missteps was because of her good luck and her flight rather than flight tendencies when she was caught off guard.

[dance_mypuppets]

"A pleasure, Tohko," he said with a nod. "Book girl, huh? That just mean you like reading, or something more?" It sounded more like a title, a profession -- the way he was a puppeteer. A definition of one's life.

[tohko_amano]

Tohko grinned. "Of course I love reading! I love books more than anyone and I know more about them! After all, who else can tell you what the origins of Peter Pan were, or how weird the first draft of that story was, or why Bulgakov burned his first draft of The Master and Margarita in despair, or the history of The Great Gatsby or why No Longer Human is a semi-autobiographical novel, or how long it took Hemingway to write The Old Man and The Sea?!"

Once you got Tohko started, it was hard to get her to stop. She gushed about her knowledge, forgetting for the moment that she had a dagger to get back.

[dance_mypuppets]

Well, Kankuro assumed those were books -- none of them sounded even remotely familiar to him. But then, he wasn't much of a bookworm, either. Plays, now, those he devoured, but usually with more of an eye toward performance than for simple pleasure of reading.

He grinned, though, and let her ramble on for a while, a little amused by all the enthusiasm. After all, he did the same thing with his puppets when so inspired. Not that he had been since arriving in Animus, but still...

[tohko_amano]

"And I highly doubt there are many people who could solve a murder-mystery using nothing but their wits, luck, and books! I even helped stop a girl from committing suicide once by talking about books! So, that's why I'm the book girl!" Tohko finished her rambling. While she loved to talk about her knowledge, she did know, due to experience, how long to ramble on for.

"Then again..I guess you have a pretty large love of puppets and acting if you're fighting with them. Maybe you're Kankuro The Puppeteer?" Tohk joked.

[dance_mypuppets]

The offered epithet made him chuckle. "Something like that, yeah," he agreed, his voice rich with amusement. "Although if my village does decide to award me a title, I hope it'd be more creative!" Still, though, he patted Karasu's head affectionately. "They are my best friends, though."

Which was still true, even if Temari mocked him like hell for it. A grown man -- by ninja standards -- still claiming inanimate objects as best friends? But Karasu was a part of him.

[tohko_amano]

"An interesting title would be nice. I'm just a simple lover of books, so I've just always gone with a simple, memorable title." Tohko nodded as Kankuro patted his puppet's head.

"I understand what you mean. Even nowadays, The Little Prince still makes me smile..and I look up to characters like Margarita and Sophie. They may not be perfect, but they're good characters who try their best."

[dance_mypuppets]

"Heh, I know a few characters from the old plays like that," he agreed, "and their examples are worth looking up to. A lot of stories -- for stage or page -- are meant to teach, yanno?" And he looked up to some of the great puppeteers, too, but that was something of a sore point, all things considered. Sasori...

[tohko_amano]

"Exactly! They can teach us, inspire us, make us think, challenge what we believe, hurt us, help us, be examples as what not to do, show us that we don't want be be like that character..there are quite a few ways characters, be they on the stage or the page, can be used!" And Tohko was happily gushing again. She was the book girl for a reason.

[dance_mypuppets]

Man, she sure called herself a book girl for a reason! Kankuro grinned. "Still, for a bookworm, seems like you're a pretty good hand in a fight. I suppose you learned that out of a book too,huh?" Making a joke of it; in his view, you couldn't learn to fight except by doing.

[tohko_amano]

Tohko chuckled and scratched her head nervously.

"While that would have been a pretty cool trick, I didn't. While I love adventure stories and action books, reading about killing a guy and living is much different than actually doing the deed. When I got here, I heard that there were monsters that roamed the halls at night, and one of my roommates, Saber, was willing to teach me swordplay. So, I took up her offer and found these daggers later with a friend. I did pick up a few tips on killing from murder mysteries though." Not that that was a good thing to normally know, but it did come in handy around here.