There was once a time when upon waking all Adrian had to do was help out around the house and garden, learn a few lessons and then his time was his. Now Adrian's mornings were packed with lifting heavy things, running around and then attempting to conquer the course. The dreaded unconquerable course.

The months passed like this and Adrian found out where all the food he had been consuming in alarming quantity was going. It was going into sculpting his body into something fit to survive their current world. Where once his body had been thin and clumsy lacking any power now he was lean and limber and brimming with it. His shorts that once reached his knees now came up to his thighs and all his shirts had started pinching at the chest and arms. Adrian was undergoing a growth spurt.

Once all of this would have seen him happy, but now Adrian didn't even notice. The exercise and conditioning that had appeared easy at first got harder as his father increased their intensity. Exhaustion both mental and physical was the order of the day and Adrian went to bed with barely a thought on how he was changing.

Through a fugue of exhaustion, Adrian just barely noticed he was swinging not from the bars that usually led to a familiar mud bath but from a rope. Almost instantly all thoughts of exhaustion were banished from his mind, for the first time and without even knowing how he did it

Adrian had passed the damned monkey bars and was swinging from a rope and wasting precious arm and grip strength. With lessons learned traversing the monkey bars Adrian swung his entire body forward and reached for the next rope. He was going to make it.

Like a boy possessed Adrian swung through the ropes, his months on the monkey bars having ingrained in him the folly of stopping to rest, it was all about momentum and control. A final swing from the ropes saw Adrian landing on the platform with the tightrope. His first time among the ropes and he'd conquered them. Forcing down jitters of excitement, Adrian got into a runners pose with the intent to dash across the tight rope to the next platform. Adrian took a step and froze, from his left came a promise of death. He had caught the eye of a predator. The intent battered at his exhausted mind and froze his thoughts and muscles and before he knew it he was falling backwards into the cold comfort of the mud. He'd failed, again.

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Just as quickly as the intent appeared it was gone, leaving Adrian a shivering mess in the mud. With supreme effort and anger that threatened to bring him to tears, Adrian struggled his way out of the mud to give his father, the perpetrator a piece of his mind only to freeze. Balanced nonchalantly on his old man's shoulder was a gigantic black cauldron. Adrian was lost for words.

“Wash up and meet me out back.” Adrian's father said with an embarrassed cough and dashed around the house still carrying the cauldron.

Confused and exhausted and with his mind in a whirl from the after effects of the intent, Adrian simply didn't have the mental capacity to think through the strange happenings of the day. With puppet like movements Adrian dragged himself free of the mud and walked to the bathhouse. Once when Adrian was younger and refused to take his bath one evening, his father had told him a story about water being medicine for almost anything. Now standing beneath the shower and feeling it wash away the mud and the confusion of the day, Adrian believed him.

Suitably centred after his bath and having changed into mud free clothes a rare occurrence these days, Adrian marched to the back of the house pulling at his collar and sleeves. All of his clothes were tight these days. Adrian came around the house and stopped at the sight of his father tending to a blazing inferno beneath the cauldron and the bubbling steam it produced from the boiling water within.

Feeling a hint of trepidation and dread, Adrian forced himself to walk towards his dad and asked, “Uh dad, what are we cooking?”

With a beatific smile on his face his father replied, “You.”