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 ;)
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?
>Start doing a more purposeful recon. Orochimaru is scarier than these guys!
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.
(Sorry, there's a maximum number of polls per post.)
>Put on a lab coat and use its pockets. / Find the most dangerous thing in that chemical cabinet.
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.
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