The Weapons
The contestants stand in a huge domed room, concrete and featureless, no exits or light sources visible. Each is held in their own slice of the dome by invisible force barriers.
Agonisingly slowly, six coffin-sized concrete chests pass through the ceiling and descend towards a contestant.
Felicia's weapon is the first to arrive. The lid of the box shoved aside, a thick dark metal rapier or baton is taken out. When it touches her hand, the air about the weapon crackles with powerful electric charge. After a few experimental swings, Felicia discovers that by twisting the handle, the weapon transforms itself into a longer, thinner metal whip made of wickedly edged segments. When swung in this form, instead of electric charge, great blustering gales spring up about the blade, strong enough to send people staggering or even throw them through the air, rushing dozens of yards away from the whip before dissipating. Finally, when Felicia adjusts a switch on the handle of the weapon, the storm winds and arcs of electricity die down, before fire springs up along it's length.
The wild-eyed schoolgirl of questionable age is the next to recieve a chest. The weapon she takes out of it resembles the bastard offspring of a torture chamber and an exhibition on medieval weaponry. A long-barreled mechanical crossbow-gun combination rests at the centre, with a foot long bayonet-sword on the business end, and a series of long blades and spikes scattered across the body, many of which have blades or spikes of their own. The handle converts variously into a bladed mace, a spear or a machete when twisted. In case one somehow ended up bereft of cutting tools or spiked objects, there is a rack of outsize throwing knives securely bolted onto the midsection. Brief experimentation proves that the weapon has a seemingly limitless supply of crossbow bolts, which it can fire rapidly without needing to reload at all. The thing is a twisted and morphing mess of blades that severely endangers the fingers of anyone who comes close yet manages never to harm its owner.
The third recipient is Nikolas Maksimov, who heaves the lid off his chest only to find a perfectly still pool of glossy black liquid. When he tentatively dips a finger in, the liquid starts to slither up his arm and over the rest of his body. Eventually, the chest is completely drained and Nikolas is fully obscured. The surface tension of the liquid only breaks once, to let the man in, and not a drop remains elsewhere. The stuff is viscous but malleable away from its owner, but almost sets when close to his skin. The outside flows about his body, a lumpen and featureless parody of a human, the surface pulled into dull ridges and mounds and the professor can still see and hear the outside world, though seemingly through a thin veil. The liquid moves almost frictionlessly over the floor, allowing movement at speeds faster than the world record, of around 60 miles per hour. He can also force it to briefly hold shapes, and aggressive thoughts produce long quivering spikes of fluid that rapidly extend from the main body. Additionally, dark blue-green sigils form on the surface of the weapon, before firing themselves at targets as screaming blasts of malevolent psychic energy.
Bobby Jones' chest contains a pair of flexible gauntlets, composed of some light and futuristic metal, extending a fair way down his forearms. When smashed together, the gloves emit huge sonic booms, which set teeth on edge even through the force barriers, and cause slight bleeding from the ears, though Nikolas is noticeably unaffected. When Bobby flexes just so, two knives on on short extensions shoot out of a padded section of each glove and begin to spin furiously, glowing white hot. A simplistic but effective weapon.
The next weapon to arrive is Gloompaw's. A long black staff attached to a wheel a yard in diameter, edged with animated figurines of Deadpool waving katanas, each a foot long and slicing desperately at the air. The wheel whirls visciously, like an insane pizza cutter, sparks flying. Once Gloompaw takes hold of it, it takes on an incandescent glow, making it almost impossible to look directly at its wielder. Nikolas, again, does not feel the effects as strongly. A twist to the wheel and the brightness ceases: instead of glowing, the weapon sprouts long shards of broken glass, which cover the wheel blades and extend down onto Gloompaw's arms, heightening the damage potential.
The final champion to recieve a weapon is of course Bloody Jones. A yard-long, slightly bent dark wooden staff leads to a foot-long block of steel extending away from the handle, with a loop of material three inches thick along it. Close observation reveals that the material is made of a combination of transparent crystals, perhaps diamond, and highly tempered inflexible metal. The strip is immensely adhesive even when at rest, and the outer surface is covered in a fractal pattern of blades and teeth, some microscopically thin, each far sharper than any razor. Treads inside the central block of steel spin the loop around it, till the teeth are nothing but a grey blur. The weapon is basically a spear with a series of chainsaw blades on the end, each joined to the next by the flat part. A few brief experiments with the heavy concrete chest and floor show that the rotating strip of material will tear pretty much anything to very, very small shreds when held against it. The weapon could best be described as the platonic form of the chainsaw.
Now the computer screens descend once again, and it is time for the contestants to choose their elements for a beast.