Over the next few minutes, I had Amber bring me to my quarters. After getting a birds-eye view of the Castle and seeing the Door to GM’s Domain, I had done everything I wanted to do that night. The idea of being escorted to my room by someone didn’t quite sit right with me, but it was necessary. I knew basically nothing about the layout of Castle Bosporus, so I would have to rely on Amber for the purposes of navigation.

My quarters were in the East Keep, so we had to walk through the South Keep. We passed by doors marked X, XI, and XII before we came to a stop. When we stopped, a large stone door engraved with an XIII stood before us. It was less a “door” than a large stone slab nestled within an alcove. The stone slab wasn’t actually connected to a wall. Rather, its massive size and weight was the only mechanism preventing entrance. Two large steel handles were built into the face of the door, indicating that the door was meant to be lifted or dragged. The door to my quarters closely resembled the stone slabs that would bar entrance to mausoleums or sepulchers. It was the kind of door that was never meant to be opened by human hands.

“So, this is the door to my quarters?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” Amber said, her mask concealing her features. Even though I could not see her expression, I could tell she was excited in anticipation of something.

I slapped the palms of my hands together in preparation. I was unsure of how difficult the stone slab would be to lift, but I was pretty sure I could lift it. GM wouldn’t have made my quarters impossible for me to access.

“Alright,” I exhaled. “By the way, have you ever seen inside these rooms? How long ago were they sealed?”

“This stone slab has been here ever since the death of the last Thirteenth Apostle one hundred years ago,” Amber answered quickly. She spoke as if this was the most obvious question in the world. I wonder if they taught about the Dark Apostles in elementary school history class in Ferrum.

I stepped toward the door and grasped the two metal handles. I bent my knees and straightened my back in preparation for the lift. I spent a few seconds steadying my breathing before I started to lift.

With focus and intensity, I pulled up on the handles. The stone slab rose up into the air, and I held it in my grasp. It was much lighter than I expected. It felt like lifting a sack of potatoes or a large bag of rice. I wouldn’t necessarily say it was heavy. Rather, it would be more accurate to say it was unwieldy.

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I stepped with the stone slab away from the alcove. For a moment, I almost lost my footing. The gargantuan stone door threatened to throw off my center of balance. I heard the sound of Amber gasping as I took an extra faltering step.

“I’m fine,” I said as I tried to better align the stone slab with my own center of gravity. I took a few slow steps to the side before, ever so slowly, placing the stone slab back on the ground. There was a small clinking sound as the stone door made contact with the stone floor. I imagine the sound would have been much greater if I had placed the door down more roughly.

With the door on the ground, I stood up straight and clapped my hands together once more. I suppose I made that gesture to dust my hands off, but there was no dust. It would probably be more accurate to say I performed that gesture to indicate that the difficult task in front of me was completed.

The effort of lifting the door made me think about the nature of my enhanced strength. I could lift basically anything, it seemed, but my strength didn’t alter the laws of physics. I remembered a few years ago during a power-scaling discussion someone said that Superman’s strength would be more accurately described as a reality-warping ability. “If Superman were to try to lift an airplane with one hand, he would just crash through the airplane’s structure. He must have some secondary ability that allows him to distribute the force of his push onto a large enough surface area that the airplane isn’t destroyed,” the commenter said. I must have lacked that “secondary ability” the commenter mentioned. When I lifted the stone slab, I had more than enough strength to lift it, but that didn’t change the fact that the slab still weighed several thousand pounds. I was significantly lighter than the stone slab, so it pulled me around when I lifted it.

Pulling myself back to the present, I stepped over to the now-empty alcove that stood at the entrance to my quarters. Inside was a large living room with a dark wood floor. A large leather sectional took up much of the area within the living room, and it was flanked on one side by two comfortable-looking chairs. On the floor was an opulent rug which the sofa and chairs sat upon. The furniture was all facing a large fireplace which held a smoldering fire. Above the fireplace was a large flat-screen TV which was connected by wires to a game console.

I didn’t recognize the type of game console, but it looked like it was from the ‘00s. Though the television and game console were rather rudimentary compared to the technology of ‘35, this was the most advanced technology I had seen ever since I had arrived on Ferrum.

I stepped inside my quarters, enraptured by such a strangely familiar sight. To the right, in an area I couldn’t see from the entrance, was a full kitchen. It had a stove, a freezer, a pantry, a microwave, and a toaster. Until that point, I had thought that such modern conveniences were out of my reach in this world.

At the far end of the room was a staircase heading upward and a thin rectangular window which had was clearly just a modified arrow-slit. At least the window was covered with glass, I thought.