...

...

"..."

In the first few seconds of waking up, fluttering in between consciousness and unconsciousness, his brain struggling on an uphill climb for lucidity... the biggest problem poor Danny was aware of was a gently throbbing headache. It would be a few seconds afterward that he would remember why his head hurt in the first place. For the time being, figuring out where he was felt more important than why. His head swiveled lazily from left to right, unable to take in too much of his surroundings on account of how incredibly... dark everything was. Crushing darkness, and choking silence. He could barely even see his own feet, let alone the chair he was seemingly propped up on.

Oh, s#^%. He was on a chair in a dark room.

After suddenly recalling the why (there it was), he suddenly felt a lot less comfortable about the how. Shaking the sleep out of his eyes (or at least, so he thought; it would be really great if this were just a nightmare), Ace quickly examined the area as best he could, and summed up the facts as such.

He was left sitting on this sorry excuse for a chair. His hands and feet were bound by something heavy and solid. Chains, or shackles, he didn't know. They felt sturdier than a pair of handcuffs, and proved it when he struggled against them. But for whatever reason, they weren't bound to the chair, and he was completely free to stand, and waddle his way around the room. The floor felt like concrete on his naked feet, and decidedly filthy, like it hadn't been used in a long time. Pebbles, and dirt, and... something sticky, and-- oh, that better have not have been what he thought it was.

The only item he could really make out in the place was some kind of button-up shirt left on the ground at his feet. 'A real thoughtful sentiment,' he thought. 'If my hands weren't #$&*@# tied behind my back.' Though he wasn't buck-naked anymore, thankfully. Someone had seen fit to cover him up with some ill-fitting trousers, but that was the extent of it.

A quiet sigh escaped his nose, and off he went, pacing quietly and awkwardly in his best attempt to find answers and avoid any rusty nails. The last thing he needed was to add Tetanus shots to the list of things to get the instant he got home, along with a new pair of socks and a frickin' cheeseburger. No, a double-cheeseburger. With a tall order of fries... and a chocolate milkshake...

He sighed a little more loudly.



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Ace sighed listlessly into the dark room. It was indifferent to him.

After a while spent letting the ringing of his freshly-walloped ears subside, however, he would begin to make out the muffled murmur of voices somewhere on the other side of the door. Yes, there was a door; a little searching would uncover a metal door, with a lever-like knob of sorts, the kind of industrial- or commercial-grade door one might expect to find in a factory, or a place of business, or some sort of government building. It was sturdy, for certain, but not indestructible.

The voices continued to chatter indistinctly beyond the dark room. It was a language Ace could not understand.

Luck was unkind to Ace. There came a sharp, eardrum-banging pang against the metal door as if someone had suddenly slammed it from the other side with something very heavy. It pounded like this for several aggressive knocks before unlatching and swinging open, letting (comparatively) blinding light in.

Several figures stood in the doorway. One held a lug wrench tightly in his fist.

"Rise and shine," said the aggressor (a nobody, from the looks of his scuzzy street attire) through a disarmingly thick Chunese accent that rendered him nearly uninterpretable.

The one with the weapon gestured for the other two to grab Ace, and they did, a little roughly, under the arms, and promptly pulled him out faster than he could likely get his footing. No violence yet from the little pack of wild dogs, though. (And they really did look to be some kind of wild, scruffy dogs, from the looks of it.) He was just yanked into a drab, subterranean-looking concrete corridor and pulled along toward—

WOOMP.

There went the violence. Unprovoked, the one with the lug wrench swung it straight at Ace's gut to knock the wind out of him. It seemed like a preemptive gesture to keep the guy in line—an I'm-the-big-man hit from a cocky youth, the likes of which Ace would have probably scared away with a dirty look under any other circumstances.

They laughed and kept barging him along. They'd soon emerge into a bigger, brighter-yet room. Ace wouldn't find it familiar, but it was the very same private quarters Tracer and Archer had visited in their last meeting with Li Fang.

One of the guys pulling Ace along kneed him in the lower back.

"Shut up!"

Guess that was one other phrase they knew. The thug with the lug wrench shook it at Ace's nose and said something that could have been Chunese or English, but was hard to discern, but it seemed to contain the words "not" and "talk." Message clear enough.

The cat was soon dragged up toward the desk. Li Fang was not there yet. They'd shove Ace toward the floor in front of the desk, right next to a chair, anyway. The idea was apparently that he'd sit, but that they weren't nice enough to place him in the seat.

The big man himself emerged from another doorway in all his well-dressed, cold-blooded (literally reptilian) glory. He was wearing a very clean-looking, sharp-collared, bleach-white button-up shirt (albeit with top several buttons undone) and dark olive slacks, neatly pressed. His aggressive-lined, lizardly eyes were covered by some lightly-tinted sunglasses with brown lenses. Yes, it was underground, but the chamber had the bright, sunny feel of daylight to it.

He wordlessly stopped next to his desk and leaned against its side, eying his guest in completely expressionless silence—not even cold, austere, smug, or devious, just blank, like one would examine a caged animal he wasn't terribly interested in. It was utterly quiet.

"I have questions for you," he said plainly, without any markedly-thick accent. He was well-studied. "Some of them I already know the answer to, and some I don't. You will answer them all truthfully, and you'll walk out of this place on your own two feet."

He apparently seemed confident enough in his own presence and power to not have to state the alternative—the if-you-don'ts and I-will-be-forced-tos typical of "villainous" sorts of his rank— and left it purely implied, assuming, no, requiring cooperation as a matter of fact.

He jumped straight to the first question.

"How did you come to arrive in Chun-nan?"