To the HP Training Machine

You make your way up into the Training department, down into the conditioning wing. The security officer at the front desk waits in boredom, dressed in full military garb as he sits bored in front of a computer. You can guess thay he fought in the Rippa Conflict a few years back, and like many soldiers had a hard time finding civilian work that provided any sort of interest.

Clearing his throat, he states 'I take it you're the tech that Birch sent?' looking at the bag of tools and the general disheveled state of your work outfit, it's clear that you're not normally on the floor where customers and Tamers might be.

'I am..' you clarify for him as you place your badge into the terminal on the desk to check in. A green light confirms your status and the guard grabs his keys and braces. 'Ok, room 2C needs the adjustments. I'll get the client and meet you in there.' He turns a prefect 90° to the right and procedes out a side door. You turn around and face the entrance of the conditioning wing then procede to walk in.

The shirt around your neck begins to feel tight as you tug on it nervously. This place always made you pretty uncomfortable. On its face, going to the HP training machine in the conditioning wing doesn't sound terribly foreboding, but that's thanks to the pleasant naming out of the marketing department.

The reality is a little harder to stomach. How do you train strength? With weights. Train intelligence? Puzzles and tests.. but endurance and hit points?..

You open room 2C and see the objective, a brand new Silph Co. C600HPx. With six independent Hex engines and 14 points of contact, the mechanism stands 9 feet tall, all black and grey with hundreds of tubes, needles and small blades. It might have been beautiful from an engineering perspective, but this is simply a monstrosity of a device.

There is no sugar coating it. Plain and simple, this is a **** chamber. The goal is to take hardened pokegirl fighters, steel type or the like, and push their bodies to somewhat horrific extremes. After a given recovery period, they usually end up being able to ignore huge levels of pain in fights and win more often.

But you have to put that out of your mind as you are here to do a job, not debate the ethics of conditioning. Afterall, the pokegirls are going to be pit against each other to fight until they pass out - the culture of this sport is built on a subliminal pretense of ****.

You get to it and turn the levers to start the engine reconfiguration process. You instinctively reach for the re-initiate lever but realize just before pulling it that its connected to the brace and strap core. No wonder untrained staff mess this thing up, you almost just did yourself. You correctly pull the re-initiate lever and plug your Dex to start the process based on your downloaded objective details. The device lowers by about 4 feet, parts moving inward to the center as it adjusts for its next host.

'Hmmm.. strange..' you say out loud to no one in particular. By the looks of it, this machine is being calibrated to a host thats.. 5 foot, 2 inches.. 92 pounds.. 'What kind of type is that? I've never seen a fighter type that light..'

The sound of the door opening from behind startles you, almost dropping your Dex.