Jovially, you told yourself, you wandered, you strolled, toward the side of the table not entirely covered in tools, assuming that they were such and not dolls or decoration, although you did not know their purpose. You tried not to stare too intently for any which might be used as a bludgeon, feeling out their weights and disposition in the hundred scenarios of potential and imminent death-causation which ran through your head.
Yes, yes, calm, calm, you continued, throating-out a little song, as lightly as you were able, to increase your stake in that space and raise up your presence there to the level of its occupant. You expanded yourself, with subtlety and magnanimity, or attempted such, though in reality what terrifying sound and loudness it must have seemed to a man so trapped, assuming he was trapped, and for so long, assuming such a duration, as this man was and had been. He certainly appeared thin and ferocious, as a prisoner might, some thin and ferocious prisoner, though that may simply have been the fashion here at that time. You modulated the volume of your noise, attempting to accommodate his delicacy, still allowing such a thing, but failing. Your mouth was first gaping and silent, then full of yelling, and yet a tune, some improvised thing, was emitted fragmentarily as you wandered, as you strolled or tried to, more quickly across the space.
As you moved you became aware, with growing appreciation now, of the flailing nature of your limbs, joints seized and distant. You willed fluidity, but staccatoed instead from immobility and lurching into a single and continuous half-run, accelerating quickly. The exertions you had been under—you guess you had been exerted—were intent on some terrible revenge upon your body and wits, to reclaim a debt. You tried to slow yourself, to stop your shuddering and hard panting, all while keeping eye-contact with the man, baring your teeth slightly apart in what you hoped was a friendly smile or ingratiating grin.
The man at that time, perhaps in fear of his life, perhaps in some form of greeting common to this place yet alien to you, leapt upright from his position by the fireplace, you assume that there was a fireplace, throwing himself with terrible speed far greater than your own up and onto the side of the table opposite you, scattering tools or dolls or decoration in all directions, and pulling himself with strength and ruddy fitness that you had not at all expected, with his upper limbs only, across the table and directly toward you.