Griffin refused to elaborate on what, exactly, the ‘Chamber of Suffering’ was supposed to be, only telling Aaron that he’d see when they got there. The cantina turned out to be pretty awesome, though.

Less of a cafeteria and more of a buffet, the cantina had banks of chafing tables set against the walls keeping a massive variety of food warm. But these weren’t run-of-the-mill warming trays, they were enhanced by magic. Griffin explained that the fields of faintly visible arcane energies kept the food sanitary, fresh, and piping hot (or pleasantly cold).

Although they’d only come for drinks, Aaron wound up grabbing a small heap of appetizers from the area dedicated to Chinese food. Egg rolls, pot stickers, and sliced barbecue pork, each went into their own containers. Aaron even grabbed a good bit extra in case anyone else wanted some. Griffin, on the other hand, met up with him at the door carrying a plastic bag stuffed with bottles of water, energy, and sports drinks.

“Is that char siu?” Griffin asked at their rendezvous.

“That’s what it’s called,” Aaron exclaimed, popping a slice of the glorious reddish meat into his mouth. “And yes, it is. I love this stuff. Want some?”

“Not right now, thanks, but now I am thinking Chinese is sounding real good for lunch or dinner.”

“I am never not in the mood for Chinese food,” Aaron said solemnly. “So what’s this Chamber of Suffering thing like?”

“You’ll see,” Griffin replied with an enigmatic smirk, setting off down the hallway.

A few minutes later, they were standing in front of a door just as nondescript as most of the others in the Drakon’s maze of hallways. Griffin pushed it open and Aaron followed behind him. He was curious — but not exactly excited — to find out just what the hell any kind of place called ‘of Suffering’ was going to be like.

As it turned out, it was some kind of gymnasium. At first, Aaron thought it was one of those warehouse-style industrial gyms, which he had avoided like the plague. They were always filled with people who were way too intense about ‘gains’ and how they were dodging rhabdomyolysis.

When he took a closer look, he saw that it was unlike any gym he’d ever seen before. The more he looked, the more confused he became. Everything was vaguely gym-like, yet none of it was quite right. Albert and Kiara walked up to find Aaron staring around the room, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

“Hey, Aaron brought snacks,” Albert said, peeking into the bag of plastic containers filled with appetizers.

Kiara was a bit more attentive. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

“No, why?” Griffin said. He looked over at Aaron then laughed loudly. “Oh,right! Aaron could probably use a tour to help him make sense of our equipment. This stuff must look like it’s right out of some sci-fi movie.”

“Yes,” Aaron exclaimed. “That’s a perfect description. What the hell is all of this stuff? Everything looks familiar but completely wrong at the same time.”

“So the first thing you have to realize is that we can’t really use standard exercise equipment because of the powers innate to all drakus, namely praeternatural strength and endurance.”

“Don’t you mean supernatural?” Aaron asked.

Albert answered as he fished out an egg roll. “‘Supernatural’ is kind of a loaded word. Some people might think of it as being anything that exceeds what’s normal, but others will latch onto the ‘unnatural’ and ‘inhuman’ meaning. It’s not a big jump from ‘inhuman’ to ‘not a person.’”

“Gotcha,” Aaron said. “So all this stuff is like a gym meant for someone with the Hulk’s strength.”

Albert made a waffling motion with one hand. “Ehhh. That dude fights planets and shit, depending on the writer; we’re not quite on that level, but you get the gist.”

“Years back, they had all these wacky magic solutions, like using dimensional magic to shrink a big weight into a smaller one without modifying its actual mass, or manipulating gravity slightly to simulate heavier loads,” Griffin said, walking Aaron through the gym. “Now we use tensile machines and hydraulic damping. It actually gives a lot of fine control since engineers already did all the hard work calibrating, measuring, and so on.”

Many of the exercise stations closely resembled the cable machines Aaron had seen at gyms hundreds of times, only the cables were much thicker. And instead of being attached to a stack of metal plates, the cables fed into enclosed pylons made of sleek metal. There were dials on some of the cases, clearly marked to denote they could be used to adjust weight or resistance to absurd levels.

“The black cases are hydraulic,” Albert said. “They’re best for trying to improve your strength. We haven’t found anyone who could breach their limits yet but that’s not surprising since it’s the same technology used to catch and stop jet fighters when they’re landing on aircraft carriers. The brushed gray ones are pneumatic and they’re better for blind testing your limits, although they can help with improvement, too.”

Griffin clapped his hands together. “Ah, but Aaron hasn’t seen anything yet. Let’s show him the treadmills next.”

The treadmills were, frankly, unrecognizable — ten separate rooms, fifteen feet across in both directions, separated by walls with thick padding. The floor was made of small, rounded tiles that tickled something in Aaron’s memory, although he couldn’t say what.

“These are really, really new — omnidirectional treadmill flooring,” Griffin said. “You can move on them in any direction and they’ll keep you generally in place. We built them into their own rooms and coupled them with some pre-programmed illusions so you can do all kinds of things in them.”

“They’re not quite holodecks like in Star Trek, but they’re not too far off either,” Albert said.

“Where have I seen that kind of tile floor before?” Aaron asked. “Did this technology come from a video game company or something?”

“A guy named Lanny Smoot invented it for Disney,” Griffin said. “That guy’s amazing, a truly talented and prolific inventor. Of course, it was possible to do something similar with magic alone, but it was aether-intensive and very difficult to automate. Combining Smoot’s omnidirectional floor with a bit of enchanting took it to a whole new level.”

“Let’s show him the Wall next,” Kiara suggested.

The Wall turned out to be shorthand for ‘the climbing wall,’ a large room with walls covered by small, multicolored protrusions. Aaron had seen rock-climbing walls before, but never any that moved on their own. The overall effect was like looking at a room made out of funhouse mirrors that someone was slowly shaking.

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“What are you supposed to do with that?” Aaron asked, trying to shrug off the wave of dizziness the slowly undulating room was threatening him with.

“Oh, it’s great for training reflexes, flexibility, strength, adaptability, a whole bunch of stuff,” Kiara said.

“This is what the old treadmills were made of, but this is easier because it can alter the landscape without needing to adapt to whatever a user might do,” Griffin said. “Give him an example, weasel boy. Show off your stuff.”

Albert smirked at Aaron then ran straight for one of the walls. When he was about ten feet away, he jumped right against the wall and anchored himself with several of the protruding stubs using his hands and feet.

Although he was wearing jeans, boots, and an Army field jacket, Albert made his way up the wall with practiced ease. He would sometimes leap for or swing from one handhold to another, but he did it all without breaking his stride.

After reaching the top in much less than a minute, Albert latched onto a handhold in the ceiling Aaron hadn’t even noticed and dangled for a few seconds. He waved down at the other three drakus with a shit-eating grin, suspended thirty or more feet off the ground, then released his grip.

Aaron gasped and had to stop himself from moving to catch the smaller man, but Albert simply landed with a resounding smack, barely even bending his knees from the impact.

“Tada!” he said, brushing his hands against each other. “Don’t even need chalk on account of my fingies are so grippy.”

“That was pretty cool,” Aaron admitted. “Actually, this whole place seems pretty cool, so why do you call it the Chamber of Suffering?”

Albert and Griffin both laughed, but Kiara answered. “We don’t call it that, but that is what it’s called. For us, it’s just a useful — and sometimes fun — gym, but for the folks who dedicate themselves to an Order in the Drakon, it’s where they get their asses beaten into a shape roughly approximating a useful asset.”

“You might find yourself agreeing with that particular moniker soon enough since we’re going to have to do a crash course to get you up to snuff,” Griffin said.

They led Aaron to the gray-clad pneumatic weight machines.

“We’re going to establish your post-Emergence strength,” Griffin said. “You know how to draw on that strength, right?”

Aaron nodded. “It’s about intent more than muscles.”

“Exactly right. We’re going to do four lifts: bench press, single bicep curl, squat, and leg press. Try not to think about any specific amount of weight, just pushing with as much force as you can manage. Okay? Okay.”

To make sure they got a good baseline measurement, Aaron performed each of the four lifts three times with a brief break between each attempt. Aaron could feel the resistance of weight with each lift, but it wasn’t the same kind of pressure he associated with free weights or standard cable machines.

He focused on using his will to direct his body, paying attention to his form with each attempt as a way to channel his resolve. After each lift, Kiara would check a readout on the side of the machine’s casing where Aaron couldn’t see it and make a note of the result in her phone. Aaron burned with curiosity to know what those results were because it never felt like he was pushing a lot of weight.

After the last attempt, he finally asked, “So how are my results?”

“Promising,” Griffin said, his tone revealing nothing. “We want to get secondary confirmation, though, so we’re going to do the same lifts over on the hydraulics.”

“It might feel a little different from the pneumatics,” Albert said. “Like, the motion might be smoother even if there’s a heftier feel, if that makes sense. It’s just a quirk of the mechanisms involved. It’s pretty hard to notice, but I thought you should have a heads-up.”

“Thanks,” Aaron said, settling down onto the hydraulic bench press.

As Aaron went through the lifts, he realized that Albert had been absolutely right — the motion of the hydraulic machines was slightly more fluid than the pneumatic, but he also felt the weight more keenly. What was most surprising, however, was that there didn’t seem to be any growing fatigue accompanying each attempt. Even with the brief pauses, he’d have expected to be feeling the burn, as it were.

“It’s weird that I’m not feeling the strain of these max presses,” he commented after standing up from his third and final squat, the last of his lifts.

Griffin and Kiara were going over the results and speaking together quietly, but Albert came over and clapped a hand on Aaron’s back.

“Why is that weird? It’s like Morpheus said, ‘You think that’s air you’re breathing now?’”

Aaron pursed his lips at the smaller man. “Uh, yes?”

“Okay, not a totally perfect example because that is air you’re breathing now, but the underlying meaning is the same: your muscles aren’t burning because it’s not really your muscles doing the lifting.”

“So, we have some great news,” Griffin said, breaking from his huddle with Kiara. “Your raw strength has a very solid foundation to start working from, which we expected, but you also show a lot of potential for improvement. Like, serious improvement.”

“Your first series on the pneumatics weren’t bad, but they also weren’t quite as good as we were expecting, especially for a Primus,” Kiara said. “We were sort of anticipating that, though, which is why we did the exercises twice; the second set was a blind experiment.”

Kiara flicked her phone several times, flipping it open to its full size, then showed Aaron a small spreadsheet she’d used to track each of his lifts. He blinked at the numbers stupidly for a few seconds, his brain flatly refusing to accept or process the data he was looking at.

His average and maximum between three attempts were very close on all four lifts, within ten or fifteen pounds or each other. But the amounts were… Kiara’s numbers showed him at around two hundred pounds on the single bicep curl, fourteen hundred on squats, three thousand on leg press, and eight hundred on the bench. That was patently absurd.

“I’m pretty sure these are world record numbers, or close to it,” Aaron said. “Are we really that strong?”

“Those are the results of your lifts on the pneumatics,” Kiara said. “Scroll down a little to see what you did on the hydraulics.”

Aaron ran his finger over the screen, moving the spreadsheet and bringing up a new set of numbers. They were larger. Much larger. His bench jumped from eight to twelve hundred pounds and one-armed curled to three fifty, while he added five hundred pounds on the leg press and six hundred to his squat.

“Why are they all so much higher? It doesn’t make sense,” Aaron said. “Didn’t you say the pneumatics were better for determining maximum press?”

Griffin nodded. “Yes, but that’s the physics of the machine; you were being held back by the magic of your own strength.”

“Did you notice how surprised you were to see numbers that might be world records?” Kiara asked. “You know we’re stronger than regular humans, so why were you shocked to find out you were stronger than the strongest humans?”

Albert patted Aaron on the shoulder. “That’s why we needed the blind test. Your first attempts were all framed by your perception, which limited what you could manifest with your will and intention. In the second round, we increased the weight significantly each time without telling you.”

“And because I thought I was lifting the same amount, I would be inclined to believe that I already had,” Aaron concluded. “Making it easier for my magic to work regardless of the hard numbers.”

“That’s basically it,” Griffin agreed. “And because you were able to do each new weight without any real struggle, we’re pretty confident we haven’t figured out what your current limits are. That will probably make your early growth much easier than if you’d already hit a plateau.”

Aaron rubbed his hands over his face, trying to wrap his head around how all this magic stuff worked. It made sense, yet at the same time it was borderline nonsense. He needed to reconcile what he knew, what he understood, what he felt, and what he believed, while none of those things wanted to perfectly align with each other.

He let out a frustrated sigh. “Ugh, okay. Going to take a bit to get a grip on all of this, but it’s something to work on. So what’s next?”

“Next we move on to the fun stuff,” Albert said, grinning malevolently at Aaron.