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He tested me hard, harder than any other prisoner. The Supervisor would tell me about the stories he heard concerning my species, tales of their abilities. He wanted to see if they were real.
“To get at those abilities, you must learn to embrace anger, fear, and the most powerful emotion of all: hate,” he would tell me. “Embrace those and you will become what you were always meant to be.”
I met each of his challenges head-on. I took a beating but always managed to come out on top—barely. And each time when my ability failed to materialize, he was not happy.
No matter how many opponents he set against me, no matter how many I defeated, it was never enough. He would peer down at me from the observation deck beside his blinking computers and whirring monitors that scanned and recorded everything I did in the pit. His lips were always pursed. He would tuck his hands behind his back and turn away.
No matter what I did, it was never enough.
“You’re capable of so much more,” he would say. “You have a power inside you that’s waiting to be unleashed. All you need to do is unlock it and show it to the world.”
I fought harder and harder, one opponent after another, and eventually, the Supervisor grew bored of me.
He stopped inviting me to his residence to show me books on my species, no longer discussed interesting topics like history or science, no longer gave me chocolate or toys.
Then one day in the pits, I did it.
I unlocked my ability when I faced an ishu. He was much bigger and stronger than me. He cornered me and I couldn’t escape…
And that’s when I felt my first palpitations of golden light. I laid my hands on the ishu and felt an unspeakable strength. His strength. I used it to defeat him.
Finally certain the Supervisor would be proud of me, I looked up at the observation deck with a grin on my face.
The Supervisor wasn’t even watching. He knelt before another boy around the same age as me, his hand on his shoulder. He brought a chocolate bar out from behind his back and handed it to him.
He’d moved on and found another favorite.
And I kept my secret to myself.
I kept everything to myself after that. I fought the fights and endured hardships because it was what I was supposed to do. I perfected my ability and used it when necessary in my fights, which wasn’t often these days.
I trained with other aliens and learned their mystical and powerful fighting styles. Some were impossible for me to master as my body simply wasn’t designed for it. I had too many bones, they said, and one day broke my back when they tried to bend me into the right position.
Sometimes, there were things you simply couldn’t do, no matter how hard you tried.
At the back of the room was a familiar sight, one I hadn’t thought about for years.
A suit of armor sat protected by its glass case, standing guard in its infinite watch. It’d always mesmerized me as a child.
It looked different from how I remembered. It didn’t have a red tint to it before, and the chest was an odd shape. One half had the appearance of a frozen magma blast, the other of a perfectly flat but shimmering and slippery surface. Each section floated a couple of inches from the others.
I used to spend hours just staring at it.
“Wow,” I said as a kid. “What is it?”
The Supervisor removed my hand and wiped my greasy handprint off the glass with the sleeve of his white jacket.
“It’s a suit of armor,” he said.
“Armor? What’s it for?”
“It’s to protect the wearer from harm. If you hit it with weapons, it won’t hurt the man inside.”
“Wow. Is it magic?
The Supervisor chuckled.
“No, it’s not magic. But science can seem that way sometimes. Come on. Let me show you the pit where the prisoners fight.”
