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When Julia got to the gym, she decided to start with her old daily prison workout routine as a warm up. Fifty pushups, fifty situs, fifty crunches, fifty bicycle crunches, twenty minutes on the treadmill as a subsitute for ten laps of the field, followed by fifty squats. With that done, she waited for one of the posturing bronzed pretty boys to be done with the nearest bench. He took one look at the middle age woman covered in scars and wlked away in a mix of fear and slight revulsion. She clearly wasn't an heir with her messy grey hair and makeup-barren face. Julia sighed. She used to be the most attractive girl in the E street nightclubs. Bigger pond, different fish, thirty years later. Not the same story.

Now a little pissed off, she hit the benches. Pressing this much would have been easy. Still technically was easy in terms of the reps. But what she was trying to train with this were both her back and shoulder muscles, and her coordination. A robotic arm was a little [i]too[/i] easy to move quickly and easily compared to a human one, and she wanted both of her arms to move in sync. In a way, having gotten used to being one-armed and having forgotten how to use her left arm was a blessing, as it made these coordination exercises easier. She didn't need to unlearn anything the same way people only augmenting one side needed to.

Her shoulders were always undertrained. She used to work out so that she could fight, and run. But she wanted to achieve this without adding too much bulk to her feminine frame. But that ship has now sailed. So what if she gets broad shoulders? A robot arm is strong but a punch from it is only as strong as the power you can pack into your shoulder.

She lost track of time as she zoned out, disassociated from her body and started thinking about other things while her arms kept on moving by themselves now they'd gotten the rhythm down. Only when her right arm and left shoulder finally started to feel physically exhausted did she come back to reality and place the bar back on its rack. She wiped the sweat from her face and arm with her gym towel, before one of their heirs approached and addressed her.

Julia caught herself thinking 'why is she holding out her left hand? I don't have a left hand' before remembering the arm. She shook Xiang's hand with her prosthetic and nodded in greeting. 

[color=7893E7]"Yeah, I'm new here. Only moved into the Spire a little under two weeks ago,"[/color] Julia answered. She wasn't intimidated by Xiang, but she was impressed. Julia had been checking in on Xiang out of the corner of her eye every minute or two. She'd seen women who were like this in prison; strong, heavily augmented, fighters. Killers, even. But not so much in the Spire. And she clearly knew how to [i]fight[/i] fight, not just throw punches. Julia liked this stranger. 

[color=7893E7]"I'm Julia Kray. And I just got done on the bench but I was going to hit the bells next if you want to talk there. Gotta say, don't see very many heirs who can fight like that."[/color]

[@Kumbaris]