thecapitol | (no subject)

Who| Kankri Vantas & OPEN
What| Settling in, meeting new people
Where| District 5 apartments at first, then generally exploring around the Tributes' area
When| Just after his arrival, some days after Enjolras' crowning
Warnings/Notes| Warning for Kankri being his annoying self, pretty much. Also, his first chronological threads will be with Claudia and the Initiate, but beyond that timing will pretty much be in the order of tagging.

Really, Kankri found the entire concept of this place absolutely deplorable. He would have no part of it. But until he could find some way to escape his captors, it wouldn't hurt to familiarize himself with the layout of the place. And also to find something to eat, he was quite famished at the moment.

He started in the suite of the district he'd been assigned and herded to like cattle, of course, but soon enough he was meandering all through the building, taking note of its occupants and features with various degrees of disapproval. He wasn't entirely sure of how to approach anyone yet, but he supposed it wouldn't hurt to try for the sake of information.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Guy was currently in the training area at the camouflage station, playing with the paints. While he was practicing things like different animal designs that he knew blended well in different terrain, he was also occasionally branching off to just finger paint little designs on the floor.

A tiger jumping of a cliff and soaring into the clouds. A little boar racing its way in the direction of a sun that spread light in spiral arms over a mountain with twin peaks. A creature that looked like some kind of cuddly black and white badger running through a field of flowers that spread their petals around it in what almost seemed like an embrace.

He happened to look up to see Kankri wandering around. He looked a bit like Signless, except Signless looked older so this was either that other guy with the foul mouth or someone that looked just like him. He looked possibly a little different, though, and Guy was the observant type.

"Hey! Didn't I meet you twice now?" he joked to Kankri.

Not only would Kankri be greeted to the sight of yet another strange human but this one had a different appearance from some of the others he might have seen around. His facial structure had far sharper edges and rather than wearing the more modern clothes of the Capitol, he was wearing a loincloth and leg wraps, bound to his legs with strips of leather. The blue wool poncho on the floor next to him was a little bit at odds with the whole leather-and-animal-skins image but the Capitol was cold and if they were making him forgo pants some of the time, he was going wear whatever he wanted up top. Right now, though he was shirtless and apparently his body was one of the canvases he was using.

His fingers were smeared in all different colors of paint and the rest of his body was covered in different places with different designs. Tiger stripes here, leopard spots there, designs of leaves gathered on a forest floor - apparently he'd been feeling experimental.

Edited 2013-12-20 07:57 (UTC)

The training center made him feel more than a little sick, with its weapons stacked everywhere. A few minutes of looking around was more than enough, he just wanted to be away from here. He wasn't going to have anything to do with this place.

Then Kankri heard someone calling to him. He was startled by the human's appearance, covered in paints of all colors. Still, at least he looked friendly.

"No," he replied after a moment. "There's two others here who look very much like me, but I've only just arrived. And you are?"

This part of the Training Center made Guy a little sick, too. He could use some of the weapons here already, to be sure - the spears, for instance, the slings, some of the wooden weapons like the boomerangs. That didn't mean he liked thinking about using them on people. Killing was an occasional unfortunate necessity, as far as he was concerned. It wasn't something he liked to dwell on. He never wanted it to be feel normal.

"Nah, I think I'm just going to pretend you're the same person and that you've just been changing outfits," Guy said, but there was a slight twinkle in his before he looked down again to go back to painting his arm. He was trying to add a bit more brown to the leaves.

"I'm Guy Crood. What's your name? Has anyone explained what's going on?"

"Please don't," Kankri grumbled. "Everyone has been, and it's more than a little disconcerting."

But he sighed. Well, this alien was at least trying to be friendly, right?

"I'm Kankri Vantas," he muttered sullenly at last. "And people have explained far more than I wanted to know about this...well, about this."

He paused, then. "What are you doing?"

"Painting."

Duh.

"First I was trying to do camouflage but then I got bored and went a little crazy. We don't have paints like this where I'm from. We have to make our own and it's hard to get it in colors as bright as some of these. Feel free to join in."

He nudged some paints in Kankri's direction.

"The floor is tired of being boring. It's crying out for artistic heroes to save it from a dull fate of being just a floor."

"Oh, I'm not very artistic," Kankri demurred, but he was looking at the paints with a touch of longing. "I'm not very good at it, I'm afraid."

"Art's not about being good at things," Guy scoffed, as if that was another big duh.

"Here," he leaned over to nudge the paint even closer. "Get messy. We can have an art-off. The person who's the biggest mess by the end wins - that's how I play it with my family back home."

Hesitantly Kankri reached out to pull the paints a little closer. "I don't know if my Stylist will appreciate me making more work for her," he said, even as he dipped a couple fingers in a nice red shade. "What's a family?"

"They don't ever appreciate anything, anyway, so don't even try to make them happy," Guy said of the stylists, going back to work to start on a new painting, one that apparently had canyon rocks that looked like marbled candy. "You don't know what a family is? How do you - where do people come from where you're from?"

Maybe he was a spirit like Gabriel or something, made wholecloth by some powerful being.

Kankri pondered the verbiage of that question for a few moments before sorting out exactly what Guy was asking. "Oh, well, trolls give their genetic material communally to a mother grub, who gestates and then lays a brood of eggs. Those hatch into grubs, which eventually pupate into young trolls, and we continue to grow from there. How does it work for you?"

Idly he skated his paint-covered fingers over the floor, making a curling, swirling design of no particular kind in red.

Edited 2014-01-16 07:38 (UTC)

Guy did not know what "genetic material" was, really, but there were only a few things it could be, so he was able to put two and two together.

The entire thing created mental imagery that he really wished he could unsee and provoked so many questions that he did not in fact want answers to. (How did they get it to the mother? Did that make everyone a boy? Also, just a general: what?)

"Uh. Okay. That's...huh."

Okay.

"See, where I'm from it's a little less..." Not 'weird.' Weird was a rude word to use. "Complicated. There's just the man and the woman - the women being the mother - and after the first part with the - "genetic material" you called it? It's just the man and her and She's the one that - well, she doesn't lay eggs. The baby grows inside her until it's big enough to survive outside. But since it's the two people and they only have one or two babies at a time, they usually stay together to take care of them. Sometimes they live with siblings - other children a set of parents had. Sometimes they still live with their two parents that made them. To survive, you need those people around you, the children you've had and your parents and their parents and the other children your parents have had."

Family was a tough concept to explain when it was just a way of life where he was from.

"The reason people mate and have children is often because of love and there are close bonds between all the different people in families. And the concept doesn't just work for people who are related that way, sometimes people will 'adopt' and bring someone from the outside into the family. And sometimes lots of families come together into larger groups called tribes."

Edited 2014-01-22 01:12 (UTC)