And starting yet another day, Lucius Bellium was lifting weights to keep his strength up and maybe even push his boundaries a bit, when things went wrong. Lucius had been working in a circus for almost all his life, and he had been born into it. His parents were among the few in the world who would be proud of their child for joining a circus, and had even helped him find out what he wanted to do to contribute to the troupe.

This morning was the slow start to what was planned to be a rather boring day for Lucius, all things considered. He was scheduled to show off his muscles a bit by carrying a platform that looked heavy and cumbersome, but was ingeniously designed to reduce the muscle strain and balance what was being held up on top of it, in this case, three women in ballerina outfits from the acrobat team.

He was going to carry them into the tent in an overly showy way, swaggering this way and that as though he could barely handle the weight and keep them from falling off. Once it looked like they were about to fall, they'd jump off the platform and, with their ballerina outfits getting “snagged” on a nail on the platform, their acrobat outfits would be revealed as they were carried away into the high wire and trapeze performance that they were to do next.

Now, as he switched from stretching to actively lifting, Lucius began to wonder if that would be possible that day. His first attempt to lift his bar worked just fine, as did the next few, but... that didn't last. As he was about to start another rep, pain rippled through his body starting from his shins and ending, strangely enough, at the crown of his head. He didn't even have the ability to scream for help as he heard his weightlifting bar hit the mat behind him, as his muscles were all – ALL – ripping themselves apart, making his attempts to call for assistance impotent.

Lucius had just about given up on surviving whatever was happening, when it changed. His muscles were left alone as his nerves, bones, skin, and ligaments all started to itch, twitch, stretch, and writhe. A low moan broke free of his rebelling body, as he tried to ride out the changes happening within him. He was just trying to remember what he ate for breakfast to figure out if he was tripping on something, when it finished.

Irritated at the interruption to one of the more relaxing parts of his day, he snatched up his weightlifting bar and put it on the rack … and then froze in place, registering what he had just done. He turned and looked back at the bar, still fully loaded with his 400 pound load-out of weights that he started with these days. He had just swiped it off the ground as though it was empty at its starting weight of 85 pounds. Confused, he moved forward and started taking the weights off, and realized that they felt almost completely hollow.

So after he put them all back on the hefty shelving that stored them, he tried lifting it, not really expecting anything. Lucius nearly swore as the entire shelving unit, with over a thousand pounds of weights and nearly the same weight in reinforced metals holding them up came off the ground with little to no effort. Now half convinced he was tripping on something slipped into his morning coffee, he put it down to go talk to the troupe's physician.

Now, “Miss Sally” wasn't your normal doctor, half faith healer shaman and half traditionally educated doctor; she used any methods that worked to heal her “clients”, or test subjects, as Lucius thought of it. But, there wasn't any doctor he trusted more, especially when it came to detecting and clearing out the effects of strange hallucinogenic drugs. So as he entered her office, earlier than she normally woke up, he expected her to be able to clear up whatever was happening with her usual efficiency.

“Hey Sally! Somethin' weird happened when I tried to start working out this morning. What can you tell me?” He said as he entered the room decked out in crystals.

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She claimed they helped filter and expel bad “auras” whatever those were, and being the superstitious sort that all good circus members were, he never felt inclined to disagree. The beads at the back of the room parted, and, looking rather like she had thrown a shawl over her sleeping robe – which wasn't all that different from her performing outfit – she stepped into the room to start examining him.

“Why you have to work with your weighty toys so early in the morning I will never know,” she sighed out as she sat them both down in chairs facing each other. “What do you mean weird?”

“Well, it started with intense pain...” He described his morning workout's interruption to her, then asked, “Now, what can do anything like that?”

“Off the top of my head? Not much. Psychotics typically don't cause pain like that, and even if you were lifting wrong, why would the pain start in your shins like that?” She explained as she checked various things. “Let me get a small blood sample to test for the main things, then we can work on your aura. You know, you have been putting that off for a bit too long.”

And then they discovered another strange thing. She couldn't pierce his skin with her needles, and when they tried a knife too, it was similarly impotent against his skin. This obviously did not seem possible, and being the carnies they were, this spooked both of them.

“Am I still trippin, or did that do nothing? That aint normal. Have I been cursed?” Lucius started freaking out, staring at his skin that, while deforming as one would expect, showed no sign of being pierced by either scalpel or needle.

“If you are seeing my needles and knives do nothing to your skin, then you're seeing the same thing I am.” Sally replied, just as freaked out as he was. “Let me skip ahead to checking your aura, as this isn't doing anything here.”

She got out her best aura crystal, and set up her strongest incense, hoping to get some sense of what was going on. As she worked her craft, Lucius slowly calmed down, not noticing the lavender, sandalwood and sage she used in her incense. She also calmed a bit, happily immersing herself in the familiarity of the task. Working through her diagnostic arts, she saw his aura nearly crackling with power. But unlike if someone had done something to him, there was no sign of intrusion or contamination.

“You're clean, but the power in your aura is unlike anything I've ever seen. How much are you lifting these days, you maniac?” She reported.

“Only around 450 pounds,” Lucius responded, in an almost trance-like calm from the herbs. “I haven't really been pushing myself that much lately, but I could have sworn I lifted my whole weights rack with little effort earlier today.”

Now, Sally knew the tone in his voice and the look on his face. Lucius could no more lie to her in this state than she could fly to the moon, whatever her friends might say of her craft. So when he offhandedly mentioned his lifting feat, she knew he wasn't bragging or trying to fool her in any way, he honestly thought that had happened.

“Oh, and about how much would you say that weighs, dear?” She said, in a casual, calm voice, trying to keep him in that state a bit longer.

“Probably 'bout two thousand pounds or so. The rack is pretty sturdy.” He replied, starting to come out of the trance, but still mostly in it. Enough in the trance-like mode that Sally knew he wasn't lying. In fact his aura also showed that he was not only telling the truth as he knew it, but unaffected by any outside source. Not even spiking his coffee or putting any sort of drugs into his system in any way would leave his aura this clean.

The changes Lucius went through were deemed non-threatening, and the show must go on, so it wasn't until a few weeks later, when the scheduled shows had ended that anyone really paid any more attention to the improvements he had obtained. Really, it only really became an issue that people thought about again when he picked up the lions' cage, complete with all of their lions in it, and set it on the train car by himself, barehanded and without anyone's help.

Now, Lucius might have been a strong man, but much of what the public saw of his feats of strength were using clever illusions and even cleverer mechanical inventions to make it look like he was much stronger than he was. And it wasn't even until the moment he put the huge lion enclosure on their train that Sally remembered the morning visit he had surprised her with weeks earlier. If you want to stir up a hullabaloo in a circus camp, something like this was enough to make the crazier members faint, and the sillier carnies go running to the far end of camp screaming about spirits and curses.

And so Lucius spent another week or two with various doctors, most of which couldn't tell anything other than that his strength and durability had been increased by amounts they couldn't measure. Soon, the news stations started having more and more reports of super-powered individuals with far more bizarre abilities than strength and strong skin, so they just decided that he was another of those who had powers, and life went on.