Either it was took dark, or he hadn’t been pain enough attention, but he reached the end of the stairs and went to step down again only of have his foot catch air and stumble blindly. Unable to catch himself, he landed in the center of a dank basement of a room, entirely different from the fantastically lit walls of Hollywood movie armories. And if this was an armory, he’d been too late to snatch up a weapon. These walls were bare but for little stone panels, no larger than his stretched hand, that were eerily illuminated by the single torch. Creeeepy.
He stood and brushed of his hands and knees. So what was he supposed to do now? Did he turn back an head back up the stairs? If he did that, they might be angry with him. So maybe he was just supposed to think about what kind of weapon he wanted? A gun would be cool. He paced the small room, and as he got closer to the walls he noticed that each little tablet was etched with a picture. Some were unrecognizable, but others he recognized from games and movies. Machine guns, canons, whips. He brushed his fingers over the engraving that reminded of a pistol and gasped.
Just then, as he’d made contact, something had hissed at him. Not like a snake or anything reptilian, but like the slow, soft hiss of air leaving the lungs for the last time. How had he known what that sounded like? He brushed the tablet again and the hiss echoed in his ears. What the hell were these tablets? Experimentally he brushed his fingers against another and a soft, alluring voice sang to him before fading away. It was too soft for him to make out the words. This had to be a trick; pressure sensitive speaker set up or something. They needed to turn up the volume if they were truly aiming to startle someone.
For a while he just poked and prodded at the different pictures. Singing, humming, hissing, groaning; each made a unique sound. Some sounded as if they were trying to speak with him, but he couldn’t make out their words. He began to pay more attention to the pictures as he heard the sounds, trying to find correlation, but from what he was experiencing, there was none. Perhaps this was a puzzle that he was supposed to figure out, or a personality quiz. If they were that curious about him, they could have just made a test on quizilla. He pressed his hand to a tablet that looked like chains snaking in an arch, with two weird figures at either end.
Louder than anything before, the tablet ROARED in his ears until Feng was sure his eardrums would pop. He let out a startled cry and fell back. That was the kind of volume they needed to put in here! Scary haunted house stuff! Wincing, he got back up. He almost didn’t want to touch the stone again, but he was so curious about the sheer volume of the sound that he found himself reaching out again. This time, it didn’t roar, but it spoke.
That sounded a lot like an order. Frowning, Feng gripped the tablet and pulled. A pale glow blinded him momentarily and then the stone was gone from his hands, replaced by a bronze-ish metal… thing.
A meteor hammer that talked. Feng had trouble comprehending what that meant. Instead of trying, he just spoke back. “You’re heavy.”
All he could muster was a breathy, confused, “O-okay…”
This Shang was obviously already quite relaxed, comfortable in Feng’s mind. Would he take over a section of it? Would this weapon be able to control him? Oh god.
”Feng.”
“O-okay…”
